The Silver Dove and Petersburg by Andrey Bely

First published:Serebryanny golub, 1909-1910 (English translation, 1974); Petersburg, 1913, revised 1916 and 1922 (truncated English translation, 1959; complete translation, 1978)

Type of work: Symbolic allegory

Time of work:The Silver Dove, c. 1900; Petersburg, 1905

Locale:The Silver Dove, the village of Tselebeyevo and the town of Likhov, Russia; Petersburg, St. Petersburg

Principal Characters:

The Silver Dove

• Pyotr Daryalsky, an educated young poet summering near Tselebeyevo
• Katya Gugolevo, the young woman to whom Daryalsky becomes engaged and whom he abandons
• Matryona, the peasant woman with whom Daryalsky is paired by Kudeyarov
• Kudeyarov, a carpenter who lives with Matryona and the leader revolutionary “Doves”

Petersburg

• Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, a romantic nihilist who has carelessly promised a revolutionary cell that he will assassinate his father
• Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, Nikolai’s father, a prominent government official
• Sofya Petrovna Likhutina, the wife of an army officer and the object of Nikolai’s infatuation
• Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, a terrorist who is Nikolai’s contact with the revolutionaries

The Novels

In an introduction to The Silver Dove, Andrey Bely explained that it would be the first volume of a trilogy under the general title “East or West” and that many characters would be continued throughout the three novels. The second work, Petersburg, however, carries over none of the characters from The Silver Dove; the two novels are connected by their mutual concern with revolutionary politics and by their dense poetic style. The projected third volume was tentatively entitled “The Invisible City,” but there is no evidence of its ever having existed. A third novel of the period, Kotik Letayev (1917-1918, serial; 1922, book), is an autobiographical work completely unrelated to either of the earlier novels.

In The Silver Dove, the young poet Pyotr Daryalsky makes a summer visit to a friend near the small village of Tselebeyevo and falls in love with Katya Gugolevo, who lives at the nearby Gugolevo estate with her grandmother, the Baroness Todrabe-Graaben. Daryalsky is quickly identified by a carpenter named Kudeyarov as the right person to father a messiah for the revolutionary group, the “Doves,” which Kudeyarov leads. The chosen mother is Matryona, the peasant woman who lives with Kudeyarov and whose mysterious, hypnotic earthiness lures Daryalsky away from Katya. Kudeyarov’s plan comes to nothing, however, as Daryalsky and Matryona produce no messiah. When Daryalsky eventually realizes his difficult situation, he rebels and decides to leave for Moscow. The Doves, however, feel compromised by his knowledge of them, and they murder him.

The historical conflict between the East and the West is worked out allegorically in the physical geography of the setting. The village of Tselebeyevo is located between the old Gugolevo estate to the west and the town of Likhov to the east. It is in Likhov that the Doves meet to plan their Asiatic, revolutionary, destructive schemes against the Western aspects of Russian culture as represented by the aristocratic Gugolevo estate. The novel ends inconclusively with Daryalsky’s death, and Petersburg, its intended continuation, develops new characters in a different setting.

The theme of East and West has a more precise historical context in Petersburg. The novel is set in October, 1905, and the Revolution of 1905 and the Russo-Japanese War loom ominously in the background. The theme is worked out in the conflict between an elderly government bureaucrat, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, and his emotionally and philosophically confused son, Nikolai Apollonovich. They have both been left somewhat bereft by Nikolai’s mother’s scandalous elopement to Spain with her Italian lover.

Nikolai lives at home with his father, and their relationship is tense and difficult. Moreover, he is abjectly in love with Sofya Petrovna Likhutina, the wife of an army officer who is Nikolai’s friend. Nikolai has somehow become involved with a revolutionary group identified only as “the party,” and in a weak moment has agreed to assassinate his father. The novel begins when a terrorist named Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin brings Nikolai a bomb concealed in a sardine tin. Dudkin asks Nikolai to store the package, and the unwitting Nikolai does so without comprehending what he is hiding.

In his misery over Sofya, Nikolai resorts to going around in a mask and red cape, badly frightening Sofya. She inadvertently comes into possession of a letter to Nikolai that explains what he is to do with the bomb, and when Nikolai receives the letter at a masquerade ball and realizes the implications of the package, he tears off his mask and leaves in a panic. His father, at the same ball, does not know the identity of the man in the red domino, but the color offends him as a symbol of the revolutionary menace that threatens the state. He also is told that his son is one of the plotters.

Father and son meet the next day but before anything can happen they learn that Anna Petrovna, the wife and mother, has returned to St. Petersburg. Nikolai, confused and distraught, absentmindedly winds up the clockwork apparatus attached to the bomb, setting it to go off in twenty-four hours. Nikolai then seeks out Dudkin to clarify the party’s demands, and he is reassured that the conspirators would not demand an act of parricide. Nikolai leaves to go home and destroy the bomb. Dudkin goes to his boss, Lippanchenko, and learns that, indeed, Nikolai is ordered to kill his father and will die if he refuses. Finding himself consequently under suspicion, Dudkin returns to Lippanchenko’s home that night and murders him.

Meanwhile, Apollon Apollonovich has resigned his position as a result of Nikolai’s conduct. When he discovers the apparently innocuous sardine tin, he removes it to his quarters to look at later. Thus upon his return Nikolai cannot find the bomb and is miserable until it explodes harmlessly with no one in the room. Events conclude with Apollon Apollonovich reunited with Anna Petrovna in rural retirement, while Nikolai lives in Europe and studies philosophy and archaeology.

The Characters

Pyotr Daryalsky, the central character of The Silver Dove, embodies the allegory of a Russia caught between the East and the West. He is a young man, vaguely poetic, of no special talent or notable background, who insinuates himself into the Gugolevo estate. He is not a designing manipulator, but instead a romantic weakling who is glad of an occasion to abandon Katya Gugolevo when he feels the occult attraction of Matryona’s mysterious peasant sexuality.

Daryalsky perhaps represents the Russian intelligentsia, caught in history between the exhausted Western tradition personified in Katya and Gugolevo, and the chaotic but vital movement from the East represented by the Doves with their roots in the life of the common people. His death and the inconclusive ending of the story leave the allegory rather unsatisfactorily suspended.

Neither of the two women, Katya and Matryona, is developed realistically. Katya has no remarkable qualities other than her beauty and serves in the novel primarily as the embodiment of a vague spirituality that contrasts with Matryona’s earthiness. Matryona is not physically attractive, and her appeal lies in her powerful projection of a mysterious life force that seems to be sensed more by Daryalsky than by anyone else.

Kudeyarov is an oddly divided figure, who sets up the relationship with Daryalsky and Matryona but at the same time suffers jealousy when he is successful. The ambivalence of his nature is reflected in his features, for his face appears split into two opposed halves. In his carpenter’s occupation, his hopes for a messiah, and the sharing of bread and wine that introduces the Doves’ rituals there are analogues to the New Testament; these details remain allusions that resist any coherent assimilation into the allegory.

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, the protagonist of Petersburg, feels painfully the loss of his wife to her Italian lover. Anna Petrovna’s betrayal has left him alone in his old age, sharing a home with a son from whom he becomes increasingly estranged. Personal relationships are exhausting for him, and he feels much more comfortable when appreciating the satisfactions afforded by St. Petersburg’s geometric street alignments. His disappointment with Nikolai culminates in the discovery that Nikolai has been appointed to assassinate him, and although there is ultimately no real commitment to murder by Nikolai, the realization of his son’s perfidy and weakness shocks Apollon Apollonovich into resigning his government post. When his wife returns, he quickly forgives her. He is an aging man whose life has been devoted to his work and who finds himself slightly superannuated and adrift in his personal life. Anna Petrovna’s return restores meaning to his last years.

Nikolai is also disturbed by Anna Petrovna’s betrayal. Before her elopement he had been an attentive, if perhaps dreamy, student of Kantian philosophy, always up in the morning and neatly dressed in his student’s uniform. After his mother leaves he becomes slothful, unable to enjoy morning coffee with his father, and addicted to pacing the floor of his study in a Bokhara dressing gown and a Tartar skullcap—sartorial emblems of his attraction to the vital but destructive forces of the East. He also takes up company with the party of terrorists, seeking something to fill the void in his philosophy. His relationship with the party seems never to be more than an immature flirtation brought on by personal crisis. The woman he loves, Sofya Petrovna Likhutina, soon loses interest in her husband and is apparently ready for a serious affair with Nikolai, but he is too naive to realize this and probably emotionally incapable of consummating an illicit love affair. His grotesque behavior in the red cape and mask reveals the extent of his removal from reality. After his absurd escapades as a red-caped mystery man and a fledgling terrorist, he is lucky to get out of his situation with no more disastrous result than a bomb that blows up harmlessly. He is then glad to take up a life as a scholar in Europe, and he does not return to Russia until his father dies.

The other characters need little comment. Sofya is a flirt married to an ineffectual husband. The revolutionary Dudkin does not seem to be made of the stuff of real terrorists, for he flinches when he learns that the package he delivered to Nikolai is a bomb intended for the murder of Apollon Apollonovich. The terrorist leader Lippanchenko, however, exudes genuine menace and was probably suggested to Bely by the double agent Azev, who during the Revolution of 1905 was in the employ of both the czar’s secret police and the revolutionaries.

Critical Context

Bely’s real name was Boris Bugaev. His father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Moscow, and it was partly through acquaintance with his father’s friends that he gained knowledge of and access to the Russian Symbolist movement in literature. His own university education was in mathematics and philosophy, and he quickly became identified with Symbolist aesthetics and was branded as “decadent” by conservative critics. He had a long-lasting interest in mystical doctrines, and in 1912 devoted himself to a study of the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner.

Many of these concerns are put into practice in his heavily symbolic and allegorical novels. Both The Silver Dove and Petersburg are written in prose that relies heavily on poetic devices such as kaleidoscopic images, passages of fantasy, and evocative symbols. In The Silver Dove, for example, Bely introduces in an early chapter a “ragged bush” that stands beside the highway from Tselebeyevo to Likhov and from the village appears to be a “dark wayfarer.” This bush appears several times and, since it is on the road to Likhov, seems to lead mysteriously to the East and all that region’s attendant menace. Similarly, in Petersburg there are hallucinatory appearances of Peter the Great, in the apparition of the Flying Dutchman. The bush and the Flying Dutchman both contribute to the impression of a transcendental dimension to Bely’s fictional realm that can be expressed only figuratively.

Bely’s status with Soviet critics, equivocal at best, and the comparatively late translation of his works into English have hampered the development of his reputation as a major twentieth century artist. His devotion to Symbolist theory and his undeniable gift for its application make him a significant figure in the history of modernism. His sensitivity to the great changes impending in Russia led to these two novels of East and West in which so much of twentieth century history is enigmatically prefigured.

Bibliography

Cioran, S. The Apocalyptic Symbolism of Andrey Bely, 1973.

Elsworth, J.D. Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels, 1983.

Janecek, Gerald, ed. Andrey Bely: A Critical Review, 1978.

Mochul’sky, K.V. Andrei Bely: His Life and Works, 1977.