Andrei Bely

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Petersburg

"Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov cast a momentary, perplexed glance at the police officer, the carriage, the coachman, the great black bridge, the expanse of the Neva, where the foggy, many-chimneyed distances were so wanly etched, and whence Vasilievsicy Island looked back at him in fright. "

"At times, for hours on end, he would lapse into an unthinking contemplation of pyramids, triangles, cubes and trapezoids"

He was thinking, and he wasn't. His thoughts were thinking themselves, and they produced a picture: tarpaulins, hawsers, herring, sacks crammed full of something; amidst the sacks a workman dressed in blackest leather, and standing out distinctly in a fog of fleeting surfaces, kept hoisting sacks onto his back; and the sacks thudded dully into a barge overloaded with beams; the workman (something familiar about him) was standing over the sacks and was taking out a pipe.

"While gazing dreamily into that illimitability of mists, the statesman suddenly expanded out of the black cube of the carriage in all directions and soared above it. And he wanted the carriage to fly forward, the prospects to fly to meet him � prospect after prospect, so that the entire spherical surface of the planet should be embraced, as in serpent coils, by blackish gray cubes of houses; so that all the earth, crushed by prospects, in its lineal cosmic flight should intersect, with its rectilineal principle, unembraceable infinity; so that the network of parallel prospects, intersected by a network of prospects, should expand into the abysses of the universe in planes of squares and cubes: one square per 'solid citizen,' so that.... "

"The wet, eslippery prospect was intersected by another wet prospect at a ninety-degree right angle. At the point of intersection stood a policeman. And exactly the same kind of houses rose up, and the same kind of gray human streams passed by there, and the same kind of yellow-green fog hung there. But parallel with the rushing prospect was another rushing prospect with the same row of boxes, with the same numeration, with he same clouds. There is an infinity of rushing prospects with an infinity of rushing, intersecting shadows. All of Petersburg is an infinity of the prospect raised to the nth degree. Beyond Petersburg, there is nothing. "

"Those were foggy days, strange days. Noxious October marched on with frozen gait. It hung out dank mists in the south. October blew off the golden woodland whisper, and that whisper fell to earth, and there fell the rustling aspen crimson, to wind and chase at the feet, and whish, plaiting yellow-red scatterings of leaves. And that sweet chirruping, which in September swims in a leafy wave, had not swum for a long time. And now the tomtit hopped forlorn in branches black, which all autumn long send forth their whistling from woods, gardens, and parks. "

"A turquoise gap swept across the sky, while a blot of burning phosphorous flew to meet it through storm clouds and was unex-pectedly transformed into a brightly shining crescent moon. Everything flared up: the waters, chimneys, granite, the two goddesses above the arch,t the roof of the four-story house; and for an instant the cupola of St. Isaac's appeared illumined; and the bronze laurel wreath flared; and the lights on the islands went out one by one. In the middle of the Neva an indistinct vessel turned into a 'fishing schooner; on the captain's bridge there glowed what even could have been the pipe of a blue-nosed bosun, in a fur hat with ear-flaps, or the small bright lantern of a sailor on watch. At this point human destinies were distinctly illuminated for Alexander Ivanovich. He could perceive: what would be, what never was to be. Thus all became clear, but he was afraid to glance into his own destiny. He stood shaken. "

Apollon Apollonovich flew out through the circular breach, into darkness above his own head (which looked like the planet earth), and he flew apart into sparks. There was pretemporal gloom; and consciousness swarmed�not, for example, a universal consciousness, but consciousness, pure and simple. Putting forth two sensations, consciousness now turned back. They descended like arms, and sensed: a form of some kind (reminiscent of the bottom of a bathtub), filled with stinking abomination. The sensations began splashing about in the bathtub with the dungy water. The sensations now stuck to the vessel. Consciousness struggled to break away, but the sensations were pulling a heavy something. And consciousness saw that very thing it inhabited: a little old yellow man. He was resting his yellow heels on a rug. Consciousness proved to be the little old man himself.

"The leaves stirred up from the spot. They eddied in dry circles about the skirts of the greatcoat. The circles narrowed and curled in ever more restless spirals. The golden spiral whispered something and danced more briskly. A vortex of leaves swirled, wound round and round, and moved off to the side some-where, off to the side somewhere, without spinning. One red webbed leaf flew up and dipped to the ground. A darkish network of intersecting branches stretched into the steely horizon. He moved into the network, and as he passed, a frenzied flock of crows took wing and began wheeling above the roof of Peter's small house. And the network began to sway and murmur, and timid and doleful sounds winged down. They merged in an organlike swell. The evening atmosphere thickened. The heart felt as if there were no present, as if out of those very trees the somberness would be illu-minated by a quivering bright green light. The bright red huntsmen with horns upraised would elicit melodic organ swells from the zephyrs. "

"Nikolay Apollinovich understood that he himself was a bomb. And he burst with a boom."

The entire square was empty. Metallic hooves fell and clanged on the crag. The horse snorted through its nostrils into the white-hot fog. The outline of the Horseman detached itself from the horse's croup. A jangling spur scratched the horse's flank. The horse flew down off the crag. A weightily sonorous clatter swept across the bridge to the Islands. The Bronze Horseman flew on. The muscles of his metallic acrms flexed. The horse's hooves fell on the cobblestones. The horse's laughter rang out, reminiscent of the whistling of the whistling of a locomotive. The steam from its nostrils scalded the street with luminous boiling water. Horses snorted, bucked and reared, and passersby shut their eyes. Line after Line flew by, a piece of the left bank, in wharves and smokestacks, in heaps of hemp-stuffed bags; vacant plots, barges, fences, tarpaulins, and numerous small houses flew by; out of the fog gleamed a side of that restless tavern. Here the oldest Dutchman of all leaned forward, away from the threshold, into cold pandemonium. A lantern quietly quivered beneath the bluish face in a black leather hood. The Dutchman's ear could catch the horse's clatter, because the Dutchman had abandoned the company of his fellow seamen, whose glasses clanked from one morning to the next. He knew very well that the feasting would drag on to the small wan hours. He knew very well that when midnight finished ringing out, the sturdy Guest would fly again to meet the sound of the glasses, would down a glass of fiery Allasch, would shake the two-hundred-year-old hand which from the captain's bridge would turn the ship's wheel away from the deadly forts of Kronstadt. The muzzle of a cannon would send out a roar in pursuit of the stern that had not replied to its signal. The vessel would not be overtaken. It would pass into the low cloud that clung to the sea. The Dutchman knew all this. He could make out the shape of the flying Horseman. The clatter could be heard. Flaming nostrils snorted and pierced the fog like a luminous white-hot pillar.

This was is last conscious expression of ordinary reality. His consciousness expanded. The monstrous periphery of consciousness sucked the planets into itself, and sensed them as organs detached from one another. The sun swam in the dilations of the heart, and the spine grew incandescent from the touch of Saturn�s masses: a volcano opened up in his stomach.

�Culture is a moldering head: everything in it has died: nothing has remained. There will be an explosion: everything will be swept away�

"He is himself a pyramid, the summit of a culture which will crash into ruins"