Petersburg - Andrei Bely

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by definition picture geographic space from a bird’s-eye view. At the end of Petersburg’s prologue, the narrator proclaims that “if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist. However that may be, Petersburg not only appears to us, but actually does appear—on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the other, with a black dot in the center; and precisely from this mathematical point on the map, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from here, from this very point surges and swarms the printed book.”10 The passage suggests that except on maps, which impose spatial order on unruly space, the existence of the city of Petersburg in the real world is precarious. If the dot on the map substantiates the city’s cartographic existence, the narrator tells us that the dot is also the source of the novel Petersburg. As if to assert the direct affiliation of novelistic writing and mapping in a city with a long textual history, he tells us that the dot is the point from which surges the printed book. The so-called “Petersburg text” of Russian literature has shadowed the actual city since the nineteenth century by such writers as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

      If the map represents order and readability, the image of the “swarm,” which will recur in the novel many times (e.g., swarming crowds), suggests instability and dissolution of form. The swarm is a metaphor for the novel’s unshaped human mass, including the revolutionary working masses threatening to cross the bridges from the islands to subvert Petersburg’s sociopolitical order. The anonymous swarming crowd that circulates on rectilinear Nevsky Prospect is compared to a “howling myriapod,” likened to centipedes, or to “viscous sediment” in another metaphor.

      The crowd on Nevsky may be described as unreadable—“unreadability” may also be applied to the novel’s fragmentary, hallucinatory representation and narrative. So, the quoted passage announces Petersburg’s readable cartographic view of the city as well as a view that cannot be read. It is as if at the end of the prologue, we descend from the bird’s eye view of Petersburg into the thickness of a bustling city, defined by the circulation and swarming of language in the form of Bely’s novel.

      Moreover, the city map in part defines spatiality in the novel. Its characters sometimes literally map the novel’s topography as they walk, run, travel by carriage, and confront each other on Petersburg’s streets, squares, and bridges, passing by the most familiar landmarks as well as traversing its dark byways. The most extensive example appears early on—as the senator rides from his home on the English Embankment on the Neva River to work, Dudkin walks from his garret in a poor district on Vasilievsky Island to Nevsky Prospect. On the corner of Nevsky, their paths momentously cross; Dudkin’s eyes light up and flash whereas the senator’s heart pounds and expands, “ready to burst into pieces” (14).

      The reason for the inclusion of a map of Petersburg in the book is for the reader to follow the novel’s action on it. You can view the way the senator and Dudkin traverse the city by visiting the richly illustrated website Mapping Petersburg, inspired by Bely’s city novel.11 As the title of the site suggests, mapping the city is its hypertext focus. For that matter, modernism, its narratives and representational practices, already contained the seeds of hypertext, for instance fragmentation, the hallmark of modernist aesthetics, modernity, and postmodernity. An exploratory medium, hypertext, defined by a variety of linkages, resembles the way we explore cities. The thirteen itineraries of Mapping Petersburg, their multiple entry and exit points, and their intersections offer something similar: they explore Petersburg life as located in urban space and in conjunction with Bely’s novel.

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      Mapping with its creation of cartographic order represents a position of surveillance as well, what Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau called panoptic vision. The postmodern urban theorist Edward Soja writes that “every city is to some degree a panopticon, a collection of surveillance modes designed to impose and maintain a particular model of conduct and disciplined adherence on its inhabitants,” in which the centralized state has played an ever growing role.12 In Petersburg, the senator, who is associated with the assassinated minister of interior who headed the secret police, represents the novel’s surveillance apparatus, characterized by the ubiquitous presence of policemen on the streets who often guard official buildings and monuments and double agents who both subvert and enable the policing function of Petersburg.

      Surveillance, associated with the terrorist plot, engenders Petersburg’s theme of detection, represented by the police, Lippanchenko, and his minions. We are first alerted to the detective genre by Dudkin, who is currently reading Conan Doyle, author of the famed turn-of-the-century detective Sherlock Holmes. It is the narrator, however, who directly references the novel’s detection motif. Calling himself a “detective,” he investigates the city’s shadows (variously called contours, silhouettes, shady types, etc.) and follows them along city streets, evoking the novel’s spatiality, here defined by movement through the city. Additionally, he mentions that he is the senator’s secret agent, anticipating the latter’s desire to have Dudkin followed and investigated. The suggestion is that the narrator serves as the senator’s double; another suggestion is that he inspires the reader to become a detective as well, with the purpose of uncovering that which is hidden in the narrative.

      Among the more predictable body parts that are enlisted in the novel’s detection project are eyes and ears, which both listen and look. The senator’s large protruding greenish ears figure him as the novel’s vampiric ear, but his ear also looks at Dudkin from behind the carriage window on Nevsky Prospect in a curious instance of modernist displacement, based on the substitution of vision for hearing. Though less predictable but equally, if not more, important is the human back, which Bely enlists to stand in for the unknown. Constituting the unseen space behind us, the back becomes an object of spying in the novel, with about half of the references to backs—of shoulders and backs of heads in Petersburg—suggesting that which happens behind the back.

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      The senator and narrator are inextricably linked by the novel’s master trope of “cerebral play.” It is a metaphor for the mental production of narrative that invokes spatial form—we may say that Petersburg shadows its inhabitants with phantasmal cerebral play, fusing mind and city. The trope first appears in conjunction with Apollon Apollonovich: “his cranium [would become] the womb of thought-images. . . . Every thought stubbornly evolved into a spatiotemporal image, and continued its uncontrolled activities outside the senator’s head.”13

      Cerebral play is often qualified as “idle,” suggesting flânerie, strolling in and exploring a city. According to Benjamin, the figure of the flâneur is transformed into a detective when confronted with the shadowy aspect of the modern metropolis: “Behind [the idleness of the flâneur] hides the riveted attention of an observer,” writes Benjamin, “who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight.”14 Petersburg’s narrator may be called a flâneur-detective whose sharp-eyed ability to surveil the city and its shady cum shadowy inhabitants turns into this sort of flânerie.

      Assuming a life of its own, cerebral play, moreover, is the source of some of the novel’s characters. The narrator tells us that the stranger (we don’t know Dudkin’s name yet) is the product of the senator’s cerebral play. At the end of chapter 1, he additionally tells us that the senator is at once the product of the author’s fantasy and of his, the narrator’s, cerebral play. So, we may conclude that in an unstable, shadowy collaboration, the senator and narrator engender the novel’s phantasmagoric plot and narrative based on surveillance.

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      In the years before writing Petersburg, Bely became interested in contemporary esoteric teachings. The description of the senator’s cerebral play as “thought-images” alludes to “thought forms.” Introduced by theosophists Annie Besant and George Leadbeater in their eponymous 1901 book, thought forms—visual representations of mental, emotional, and spiritual states of heightened consciousness—influenced the visual language of early abstraction.15 Describing Petersburg’s characters, Bely referred to them as “thought forms” that had not yet reached consciousness, that the novel and its revolutionary

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