The Life of a Man, or A Walk along Nevsky Prospect

V. I. Dal’s novella “A Human Life or a Walk Along Nevsky Prospekt” belongs to the Petersburg works of the writer. Petersburg left a great mark on his fate. Here he studied, served as a naval officer and as an official for special assignments under the Minister of Internal Affairs, worked as a doctor in a hospital, and here his destiny as a writer took shape; his friendship with Pushkin began here.

Dal knew well the Petersburg of his time and its history.
A modern reader will with interest read about the division of Nevsky Prospekt into the left—aristocratic—and the right—plebeian—side, which persisted at the beginning of the 20th century. From Dal’s novella you can learn what used to be where the Anichkov Palace and the Alexandrinsky Theatre stand, in the territory of the Apraksin Yard; where the houses of the pastry-chef merchants—Germans—were located, what transport looked like in those times, where and how residents of the capital spent their leisure time, what rivers crossing Nevsky Prospekt looked like, and much more. The realism of these details is not the writer’s goal in itself. It creates the space and time of the plot.

In the first posthumous collected works of V. I. Dal (St. Petersburg–Moscow, 1897, Vol’f partnership, vol. 3), the novella inside the text of the work was indicated as “Nevsky Prospekt,” which created a clear premise for comparison with Gogol’s work of the same name. Dal undoubtedly knew the contemporary Petersburg works of Pushkin, Gogol, and other writers. Within it there is the direct Dal text itself, and there is also the intertext of Petersburg works by other authors. This combination of text and context determines the stylistics of the novella as a special Petersburg metatext in Russian literature of the first half of the 19th century.

Everything that is not Nevsky Prospekt seems to the hero like a foreign land, abroad. Precisely these words—“foreign land,” “foreign side,” “abroad”—and, in parallel, the word “homeland,” meaning the distant part of Nevsky Prospekt near the Nevsky Monastery with its cemetery (as it was then called, the Alexander Nevsky Lavra) permeate the text.

Thus, the novella gives rise to a special Petersburg—limited narrowly to one street—and at the same time expanded to the scale of the world, containing an entire human life. A human life is, for Dal, a walk along Nevsky Prospekt in both the literal and the figurative sense. The starting point of this life is the Nevsky Monastery, and the end of the “walk” is the Nevsky cemetery by the monastery. The symbolism is clear: movement ends where it began—this is a kind of journey “from nowhere to nowhere,” as the modern writer called his novel.

The hero of the novella is a foundling humpback—raised in the family of a German baker, Ivan Ivanovich, and his wife Anna Ivanovna. The adoptive parents found the child at night on the porch of their little house, which adjoined directly to the cemetery, on the right, plebeian side of Nevsky Prospekt.