St Petersburg

Bitov recalled the “strange friendships” with older Leningrad writers, who during the Khrushchev thaw

suddenly gained the childlike ability to talk about what interested them, and in us they found a grateful audience. Since they were richer, they could put a bottle of vodka and some food on the table and invite the young people. Kushner used to visit Lydia Ginzburg, the last surviving student of Tynyanov. Then he brought me to see Ginzburg. We did not know then that she wrote excellent prose. We were also invited by one of the Serapion brothers, Mikhail Slonimsky. We visited Professor Berkovsky, erudite and charming. They all enlightened us.98

Leaving poetry for prose, Bitov was one of the first to present and analyze the character of the new “superfluous man” in Russian literature, the young Leningrad intellectual, disillusioned by official ideals and clumsily feeling his way, tripping at every step, toward a still inchoate system of moral values. (Bitov was particularly attentive to the description of tiny moral vacillations.)

Bitov’s hero, usually a first-person narrator, aimlessly wandered the streets of the city and, in the classical tradition, tried to stifle the depression gnawing at him in skid row dens frequented by local bums. “Here they smoke and here they drink vodka, here they live their ended lives. Here is hubbub and familiar faces. And apparently even the liquor authorities understand that it is useless to try to combat this. The red vending machine spits out my beloved Volzhskoe wine and will spit it out as often as I want it. I want it more times than I can remember.”

Even though Bitov’s work had, from the very beginning (he was first published in 1960, when he was in his early twenties), a marked autobiographical character, a distance was maintained between the narrator and the author, a distance that Bitov probably wanted to dissolve in the flow of lyric prose. He did it by developing his own form of the Russian travelogue genre, covering the entire Soviet Union in search of creative stimuli and impressions—in particular, joining geological expeditions in the Kola Peninsula, beyond Lake Baikal, in Central Asia, and in Karelia.

This was a fashion of the times, probably started by Brodsky. For Brodsky (unlike the professional mining engineer Bitov) such an expedition was a way of “breaking out” of the system and simultaneously achieving poetic self-assertion. Thanks to Brodsky, who boasted that he “filled geological expeditions with schizophrenics, alcoholics, and poets,” this not easy but romantic way of making money was taken up by many Leningrad writers, including Gorbovsky and Kuzminsky. It was an escape.

But for Bitov distant travels were an opportunity to describe sensibilities and problems in a more multifaceted way. In that sense, Bitov’s travel sketches (particularly popular were his descriptions of voyages to Armenia and Georgia), often marked by the more or less direct influences of Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, and ruminating on the common cultural and political dreams of the peoples who inhabited the country, were a direct continuation of the imperial theme of Russian literature, which went back to Pushkin. Even on the outer limits of the empire, Bitov remained an unmistakably Petersburgian type: restrained, observant, ironic, and uncertain about matters great and small.

Petersburg—both the imperial city of Pushkin and its Leningrad mutation—became one of the main characters of the experimental novel Pushkin House, planned by Bitov as a requiem for the Petersburg intelligentsia. He sat down to write it in 1964, at the very end of the Khrushchev period, sensing, as he called it, the despair of a dying era. (He later admitted that the despair could have also been the shock of Brodsky’s trial, which Bitov attended as a frightened spectator.)99

The novel’s hero, the young philologist Lev Odoevtsev, worked at Pushkin House, the Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, the oldest research institution of its kind in the country. It had been praised by Blok in a 1921 poem, a line from which is used as the novel’s epigraph. But the title Pushkin House (Bitov had considered A la Recherche du destin perdu and Hooligan’s Wake) carried symbolic significance: this was all of Petersburg, all of Russia, and most important, all of Russian literature.

The introduction of the classics of the Petersburg canon into the novel’s fabric is a constant factor: epigraphs, citations (open and hidden), borrowings, and allusions to Pushkin (particularly The Bronze Horseman), Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, and Zoshchenko collide, re-creating the inner world of a hereditary Leningrad intellectual of the late twentieth century.