Was Dudkin a woman? Sexual/gender ambiguity in Bely's Peterburg. (1).

Ober, Kenneth H.

Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880-1934), one of the principal writers of the Russian Symbolist movement, produced a novel considered by many literary historians to be one of the greatest of the 20th century. Peterburg was first published serially in 1913-14 and in book form in 1916. Bely revised it--largely by making more or less random drastic cuts--for its republication in Berlin in 1922. The novel was reprinted in Soviet Russia with further changes in 1928 and 1935. Several reprintings of different versions have since appeared outside Russia. (2) While the cuts of the 1916 version may have improved the novel structurally, they resulted in dangling loose ends and unpursued hints. This in turn, incidentally, has had a negative effect on translations, giving rise to passages which make little sense.

Possibly the most obvious resultant double ambiguity (one layer original and intentional, the other derived and accidental) concerns the character of Dudkin/Pogorel'sky, the revolutionary and fugitive living illegally with a false passport in St. Petersburg. In the novel Dudkin first appears characterized as the mysterious "unknown one" or "stranger" ("neznakomets") or "elusive one" ("neulovimy"). This figure has been described by some Bely scholars as characterized by sexual abnormalities, (3) but if the 1916 version is attentively read (many of the key passages were eliminated in the later versions), an interpretation emerges which removes most, if not all, of the examples of the "abnormalities" attached to it. Accompanying almost every mention of this character, whose alias is given as Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin (his "real" name is supposed to be Aleksei Alekseevich Pogorel'sky), is invariably the phrase "s chernymi usikami" ("with little black moustaches"). The emphatic constant repetition of this phrase attracts the attention of the reader to such a degree that he begins to suspect that there is something amiss with the little black moustache. While the act of shaving and clean-shaven faces are often mentioned relative to male figures (e.g., Lippanchenko and Likhutin) in the novel, nothing is ever said alluding to Dudkin's having shaved. In conversation, for instance with Nikolai Apollonovich, Dudkin sometimes plays with his moustache--as if it were unfamiliar to him. In sum, the "little black moustaches" seem unnaturally black and in general unnatural on Dudkin's face; they could be false, and a part of a disguise.

When Dudkin makes his first appearance, coming out of his filthy tenement building in a Petersburg slum, the following significant scene takes place: ... then a black cat, turning up at his feet ... cut across the path, dropping chicken guts at the stranger's feet; a spasm distorted my stranger's face; his head was nervously thrown back, revealing his delicate neck. These movements were peculiar to young ladies of the good [old] times ... (... to chernaya koshka, okazavshayasya u nog ... peresekla dorogu, ronyaya k nogam neznakomtsa kurinuyu vnutrennost'; litso moego neznakomtsa peredernula sudoroga, golova zhe nervno zakinulas', obnaruzhiv nezhnuyu sheyu. [Eti dvizheniya byli svoistvenny baryshnyam dobrogo vremeni ...)

In this, Bely's earliest version of his novel in book form, it seems highly significant that we are presented with this suggestive scene immediately on being introduced to one of his four central figures. Although Dudkin, whose name we do not know at this point, is a hardened terrorist--one who has endured exile to sub-arctic regions and has escaped to Helsinki (when Finland was a part of the Russian Empire) and then to St. Petersburg, and who has apparently committed some violent crime--he cannot suppress a girlish twitch and grimace of disgust at the chicken guts, revealing a delicate, feminine neck. As readers, we are puzzled and at once alerted to be on the watch for other such signals.

Then there is the matter of Dudkin's voice. Repeatedly, particularly when agitated, Dudkin is said to speak in a falsetto ("fistuloyu"). The author does not comment on this conspicuous characteristic, but the attentive reader makes note of it. First the feminine gesture of repugnance and revelation of a girlish neck, and now a high-pitched voice--all must be authorial hints that Dudkin is even more mysterious than he first seemed.

In conversation with Nikolai Apollonovich--the only other character in the novel in whom he comes close to confiding--Dudkin's remarks are sometimes quite suggestive. For example, visiting Nikolai Apollonovich unexpectedly, Dudkin, dismissing the latter's embarrassment at being caught in his dressing gown, says, evidently protesting too much, "you are not a young lady, and neither am I" ("vy ne baryshnya, da i ya ne baryshnya tozhe"). Later, while chatting in Nikolai Apollonovich's room, Dudkin suddenly catches sight of a mouse in a trap, screams, and generally reacts hysterically. He will not be calmed until a servant takes the mouse out of the room (Dudkin's host, it turns out, is fond of mice, and refuses to injure one). This behavioral pattern had become so stereotyped as traditionally being characteristic of women that it is almost burlesque. It is hardly the behavior expected from a hardened terrorist. Subsequently, describing his nervous state--he thinks, with reason, that a mental breakdown is imminent--Dudkin continues, ... there have appeared other peculiar erotic feelings ... I have never been in love with any woman; I have been in love with--how to say this--separate parts of the feminine body, with toilet articles, with stockings, for example. But men have fallen in love with me. (... poyavilis' eshche osobye lyubostrastnye chuvstva ... ni v kogo iz zhenshchin ya ne byl vlyublen: byl vlyublen--kak by eto skazat': v otdel'nye chasti zhenskogo tela, v tualetnye prinadlezhnosti, v chulki, naprimer. A muzhchiny v menya vlyublyalis'.)

Dudkin as a woman may be exhibiting a slight sexual deviation in his fetishism, but the significant point here is contained in his concluding remark, that men used to fall in love with him. This is hardly surprising if he is in fact a woman.

Toward the end of the Dudkin story, when Dudkin confronts the loath-some double agent Lippanchenko who psychologically cows him, Dudkin bursts into tears. Of course, women have no monopoly on tears, but we are conditioned to believe that this is more a feminine act than a masculine one.

We have been given no clear conception of Dudkin's physique, and we see him only in his moth-eaten old suit with his equally worn coat. At one point he notices that he is taller than the diminutive Nikolai Apollonovich, but he is still apparently rather small. In the scenes leading up the final gruesome settling of scores with Lippanchenko, Dudkin is repeatedly referred to as "the very small figure" ("figurochka," a double diminutive), or later as "the small figure" ("figurka").

Thus Dudkin is a small or very small person with girlish squeamishness, a delicate neck, and a high-pitched voice, and is a person with whom men have repeatedly fallen in love. This is also a person who is afraid of mice and one who bursts into tears when bullied and threatened. Based on these clues scattered throughout the 1916 version of the novel--and largely removed or distorted in the 1922 version--one cannot escape the conclusion that Dudkin is a woman. The only two drawbacks to this conclusion--his masculine "real" name and the fact that he apparently never betrays himself by using feminine endings to past-tense verbs--can easily be dismissed as authorial oversight or deliberate mystification.

The final episode of the Dudkin-Lippanchenko thread of the novel presents a lurid scene filled with sexual innuendos, overt and otherwise: When they went in the next morning, Lippanchenko was no more, but there was a pool of blood; there was a corpse; and there was here the little figure of a man--with a grinning white face, beside himself; he had a little moustache; the ends were turned up; it was very odd: the man had mounted the corpse; he was holding a pair of scissors clenched in his hand; this hand he had stretched out ... Evidently he had gone mad. (Kogda utrom voshli, to Lippanchenki uzhe ne bylo, a byla--luzha krovi; byl--trup; i byla tut figurka muzhchiny--s usmexnuvshimsya belym litsom, vne sebya; u nee byli usiki; oni vzdernulis' kverkhu; ochen' stranno: muzhchina na mertvetsa sel verkhom; on szhimal v ruke nozhnitsy; ruku etu proster on ... Vidimo, on rekhnulsya.)

After murdering Lippanchenko, who had undressed for bed--Bely is at pains to tell us that Lippanchenko always slept in the nude--Dudkin mounts the corpse ("na mertvetsa sel verkhom"). In light of Dudkin's "real" sex, this is clearly a sexual image, although it has been interpreted as a reflection of Pushkin's Bronze Horseman (Mednyi vsadnik) since obvious allusions to Pushkin's work have appeared earlier in the work. The ends of Dudkin's moustache are now turned vertically; heretofore they have apparently hung limply. It seems not far-fetched to interpret this as a symbol of the sex organ which Dudkin lacks--an interpretation strengthened by the fact that, for no reason indicated by the author, Dudkin's arm (the Russian word "ruka" means both "hand" and "arm"), with the hand holding the murder weapon, is stretched straight out. Thus the entire act of murder with the pair of scissors becomes a mad sex act.

In the 1916 version of Peterburg Bely apparently for some reason intended for the reader to interpret the enigmatic Dudkin to be a disguised female figure and provided the encoded clues leading to that conclusion. The preoccupation of the Symbolists with masks (Nikolai Apollonovich's costume, the masked ball, etc.) was one of their characteristics; (4) Dudkin's mask is an invisible one. The crude and massive authorial cuts in the 1922 version obscured the fact that Dudkin was indeed not sexually abnormal. On the contrary, "he" was quite normal--"he" just happened to be "she."

Notes

(1) The edition used here is that of 1916. The recent reprint (Paris: Bookking International, 1994) contains many misprints and has therefore been compared with the Bradda 1967 version (Rarety Reprints 1) throughout. All conclusions expressed here are thus based on that version of the novel.

(2) For a complete publication history of the novel, see, e.g., the translation of Peterburg (the 1922 version) by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. xxiii-xxvi.

(3) See, for example, Ekaterina Kuleshova, "Erotika i revoliuciia v Peterburge Belogo." Russian Language Journal, No. 110 (1977), 77-88. The article was reprinted in her Polifoniia idei i simvolov (Toronto: Sovremennik, 1981).

(4) See, e.g., Victor Terras, A History of Russian Literature (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 394.