St Petersburg

It was important for Bitov that his hero be an aristocrat, a prince, but perhaps more important, that both his hero’s father and grandfather be professional philologists. This provided an opportunity to draw parallels between the history of the Odoevtsev family and the history of twentieth-century Russian literature as well as to decorate his otherwise static plot with a garland of essays about great Russian writers.

The lot of Pushkin House was a hard one, simultaneously typical and not; what Bitov called “a strange life.”100 The novel grew in fits and starts and was completed in the fall of 1970. Bitov recalled how after a sleepless night spent finishing the last few pages, he went out to bring the manuscript to a publishing house and on Nevsky Prospect ran into Brodsky (“who was no Nobel laureate then, but just a hoodlum like the rest of us,” Bitov added). Brodsky asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’ve just finished my novel; it’s called Pushkin House; I’m taking it to the publisher.”

“I got a postcard today from Nabokov about my Gorbunov and Gorchakov” said Brodsky.

“And what did Nabokov have to say?”

“That in Russian poetry one encounters such meter extremely rarely.”

Having boasted to each other in this way, Brodsky and Bitov parted. Bitov’s hopes, however, were not justified: the publishing house refused to print his novel.101 Thus began Pushkin House’s existence as a samizdat text.

Bitov persisted in getting at least parts of the novel past the censors. And by hook and by crook, after agreeing to major changes, he did manage to publish a series of excerpts under various titles, making up only a third of Pushkin House. It was a humiliating experience. The novel’s key moments—including the culminating scene of the hero’s Homeric drinking bout that precedes a duel with ancient (Pushkin) pistols—never reached the average reader, and the symbolic aspect of Pushkin House as a wake for the Russian intellectual remained hidden.

After waiting a few more years and concluding that further compromises were unacceptable, Bitov took a daring step: he allowed Pushkin House to be published (in Russian) in 1978 by Ardis, the American publishing house whose authors included Nabokov and Brodsky. Bitov later recalled his emotions when he finally held a copy of this version of his long-suffering novel: “astonishment, then fear, then hope—‘maybe I’ll get away with it.’”102

Though not openly subjected to repressions, Pushkin House remained on the “proscribed list” of the Soviet censors until 1987, when, seventeen years after its completion, it was printed by the Moscow journal Novy mir and became a sensation of the glasnost era.

Over the years Pushkin House became larded with author’s comments, notations, and essays that belonged to the pen of either Bitov or his philologist hero. In this postmodernist structural openness Bitov’s work somewhat resembled Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero, which curiously Bitov had not originally appreciated. After Akhmatova had given Bitov a typewritten variant of Poem Without a Hero to read, he returned it with a sheepish remark about “not being a master of compliments.” Akhmatova quickly sized up the situation: “Well, why aren’t you a master?” and slammed the door in his face. The dialogue had failed.103

The structural manipulations of Pushkin House, which transformed the novel into an essentially open text, as well as the author’s descriptive experiments and use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness, place Bitov’s work among the landmark modernist prose works about Petersburg, including Bely’s Petersburg, Vaginov’s novels, Kharms’s Incidents, Zoshchenko’s stories, and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.

Gorbovsky once compared the rhythm of Bitov’s prose with “the movement of a solitary swimmer among the waves of a commonplace emptiness when the swimmer seems about to drown, but again and again his head is seen above the surface; the loneliness of such swimmers is no tragedy, nothing sad about it, but almost a world-view or even a religion.” Bitov’s experience of “outsideness” had as one source Petersburg’s outside location and position vis-à-vis the rest of the country.

Bitov’s earliest memories involved the siege of Leningrad (“bombs, corpses all around—that wasn’t scary, what was scary was being hungry”). Like many others, he felt that he had been raised by the city itself. “We read Leningrad like a book.”104 A contemporary of Bitov’s, Viktor Sosnora, the author of tragic, surrealist poems and historical prose about Petersburg, confirmed that sense. “Petersburg’s scenery and sets create a special psychological climate that basically forms you as a writer.”105