It was James Joyce's misfortune that he wrote for the English-speaking world - Andrei Bely's tragedy that he wrote for a Russian culture that would virtually disappear with Josef Stalin. Both writers created great novels, works of art that have influenced others ever since. But both men's greatest works - Ulysses and Petersburg, respectively - are more praised than read. To borrow a Marxist catchphrase, I would propose that "the wheel of history" crushed each artist's novel. They were smashed under a tread of time that gave no countenance to the nuances of style, storytelling and psychology the authors sought to explore, thus depriving the authors from achieving the popular audience their works deserved. Petersburg and Ulysses now stand like the giant statues on Easter Island: solitary, isolated accomplishments that emanate power without clear connection to the everyday world from which they derived their life's blood. There is a distinction between Ulysses and Petersburg, though, in how they each came to this impasse. Joyce definitely chose his isolation; Andrei Bely did not.
In discussion their mutual exile, one must also discourse on their common bonds. It is an easy cliche to say that Petersburg and Ulysses are "style-conscious" novels. Excerpts from each point to that fact quickly. In this passage from Ulysses, the hero, school lecturer Stephen Dedalus living in Dublin, is borrowing money from a headmaster - and learns that he must copyedit an article as part of the repayment:
- I have put the matter in a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It's about the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two opinions on the matter.
May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme. European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow wa...