Petersburg

Andrei Bely’s Petersburg is among the most celebrated novels in Russian symbolism and modernism, portraying a red-stained city suspended on the precipice of revolution. “The colour red was emblematic of the chaos that was leading Russia to its doom.” Indeed, throughout the entire novel, Bely warns of this impending collapse: “[…] all believed in spring: a popular cabinet minister had indicated that spring was coming.” Kharms, writing decades later under the suffocating grip of the Stalinist regime in what was later collected in The Man with the Black Coat, inherits the post-revolution landscape. For Kharms, the ‘coming spring’ is no longer a looming prophecy, but rather the violent, mundane reality of daily Soviet life. “Thus began a beautiful summer day,” we hear in the short story A Symphony, only after witnessing citizens spitting and throwing rocks at one another, running into walls, beating up women and kids. While separated by regime and literary movement, Bely’s apocalyptic vision for St. Petersburg and Russia forms the structural and thematic groundwork for Kharms’s literature of the absurd. If Bely portrays the ‘ticking bomb’ that threatens to shatter the fabric of Russian reality, Kharms, inspired by his warning and living the consequence of not having listened, depicts the fragmented, almost nonsensical rubble left in its wake.

Several elements in Kharms’s work suggest the author was influenced by Bely’s “premier novel of Russian modernism.” Firstly, Petersburg marked a stark break with the common themes depicted by his predecessors. In his grid-shaped city, chaos reigns supreme, shadows lurk the streets and illusions, masks and even personified monuments and statues become characters. This is in contrast with both classical writers, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, most famous for their depiction of aristocratic families and large drawing rooms, and realist portraits, such as those of Anton Chekhov. Kharms picks up on the thematic break and pushes it even further, writing about illusory trips to Brazil, domestic and public violence, and ultimately the banality of death. For example, in The Old Woman, the author describes what would be recognisable today as a ‘zombie’, a dead body crawling on the floor trying to attack the story’s protagonist.

Both authors are therefore bringing entirely new thematic elements into their narration. Most significant among them is the element of the crowd, depicted as a combined entity rather than the individual actions of single persons, and common to both authors. In Petersburg, it takes the form of a ‘myriapod’: “All the shoulders formed a viscous and slowly flowing sediment. […] There the body of each individual that streams onto the pavement becomes the organ of a general body. […] There were no people on the Nevsky, but there was a crawling, howling myriapod there.” For Kharms, the crowd acts as a participating character, with its own curiosity and volitions. In “The Cashier,” we read: “People gathered from all directions. There was a crowd in the street. Doormen appeared. Whistles were heard. In a word, a real sensation.” Or again in “An Event on the Street”: “A fairly large crowd gathered round. A man with dim eyes kept falling off of the policeman’s stand all the time.” Most notably, however, the crowd is even capable of murder in “A Lynching”: “The crowd gets excited, and for lack of another victim seizes the man of medium height and tears off his head. The torn-off head rolls along the pavement and gets stuck in the drain… The crowd, having satisfied its passions, disperses.”

Another element of similarity between these two authors is found in their narrative style. Bely tells his story using a highly unusual format. By chopping up paragraphs and placing text unevenly across the page, he makes the physical book reflect the disorder of the setting. This disjointed layout is paired with lively dialogue, an almost musical, “symphonic” rhythm, twisted temporal leads, and narrators that frequently switch. Together, these techniques pull the reader directly into the messy, chaotic reality of Petersburg. Kharms and the Oberiuty take this structural experimentation to its ‘horrific’ limit. In The Man With The Black Coat, the foundational pillars of narrative logic are almost entirely abolished. Characters trip, fall out of windows, forget how to count, or, piece by piece, vanish completely for no logical reason at all. In Kharms’s short stories, this is deliberate; there is no deeper meaning to the chaos: “The plot is not important to us,” and “We are not going to explain it,” we read in The Oberiu Manifesto. These stylistic and narrative choices make both Kharms’s and Bely’s work immediately stand out and gripping for the reader. Kharms describes it best: “Poetry is not porridge that one swallows without chewing and forgets right away.”

Finally, the evolution from Bely to Kharms is especially striking in their depictions of violence. In Petersburg, the threat of harm is primarily political, revolving around the heavy, suspenseful presence of the ‘sardine can’, a terrorist bomb. “Everything, everything, everything: This sunlit glitter, the walls, the body, the soul – everything would crash into ruins. Everything was already collapsing, collapsing, and there would be: delirium, abyss, bomb. A bomb is a rapid expansion of gases. The sphericality of the expansion evoked in [Nikolai Apollonovich] a primordial terror, long forgotten.” Gruesome violence is also depicted in the assassination of Lippachenko:  “his back had been slit open.” While also depicting violence, Kharms empties it of any broader meaning or ideological purpose. His characters inflict harm on one another for no apparent reason, turning brutality into a sort of dark, nonsensical physical comedy. A cashier is replaced with the dead body of a young girl, and nobody seems to even notice. Violence has become the norm, and the meaning of human life has almost entirely lost significance. Thus, Kharms draws on several sources of inspiration from Bely, and pushes them beyond the limits of what was deemed publishable in the pre-revolutionary era.