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ANDREI BELY’S PETERSBURG IS THE premier novel of Russian modernism. Its main character is the eponymous prerevolutionary capital of Russia in the throes of sociopolitical conflict. A true city novel, Petersburg is considered the literary highpoint of the myth of St. Petersburg as doomed city, a dying city that has been invaded by shadowy characters, including terrorists. Bely’s novel aligns the end of Petersburg with the apocalyptic presentiments of the Russian fin de siècle that spilled over into the twentieth century. Set during the 1905 revolution, a time of sociopolitical crisis, political assassinations, and labor strikes, the novel has a terrorist-cum-Oedipal plot: the assassination of a reactionary government official in which the son had agreed to participate. Terrorist bomb-throwing was not uncommon in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, with the 1904 assassination of the reactionary Minister of Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve serving as Petersburg’s subtext.¹

The novel represents a nexus of modernity and modernism, characterized by verbal fragmentation, radically new image making, and contingent urban experience caused by overstimulated senses and nerves. In the now well-known essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), the German sociologist Georg Simmel described the modern urban condition as “the rapid telescoping of changing images . . . and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli”² that confound the emotions and nervous system of city dwellers. He defines modern existence as “the experiencing and interpretation of the world in terms of . . . our inner life, and indeed as an inner world, the dissolution of fixed contents, in the fluid elements of the soul . . . whose forms are merely forms of motion.”³ Bely’s novel certainly fits Simmel’s description, including the relationship of motion and emotion and the blurring of outer and inner worlds, as a result of which, Petersburg’s characters are unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. They inhabit a phantasmagoric dream world in flux, as if portending Walter Benjamin’s well-known 1935 description of Paris of the Second Empire. His famous statement that the “world dominated by its phantasmagorias . . . is ‘modernity’”⁴ resonates with Bely’s evocation of Petersburg as a sinister living organism whose streets “transform passerby into shadows.”

After the initial serialization of the novel, the influential Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in his 1914 Picasso essay that Bely “may be called a cubist in literature. Petersburg indeed reveals the same process of flattening and fragmentation of cosmic life as a Picasso painting. Word crystals are atomized in his wonderful, nightmarish verbal combinations.”⁵ After its publication in book form, Berdyaev wrote an expanded review of Petersburg, titled “An Astral Novel,” in which he describes its “breakdown and dissolution of all firmly established boundaries between objects. The very shapes of people are decrystallized and atomized; they lose the firm boundaries separating them from each other and from the objects of the surrounding world. . . . A man morphs into another man, an object morphs into another object, the physical plane morphs into an astral plane, the cerebral process—into an existential process.”⁶ Berdyaev’s observations remain essential for our understanding of the all-important visual element in Bely’s novel, which remains virtually unexplored.

The crisis of representation that characterized the more radical expressions of modernism also resulted in the recuperation of earlier artistic periods; in the case of Petersburg, Bely turned to the baroque, the style that defined some of the most spectacular architecture of the imperial capital.

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The city of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703, would come to rival other European capitals in architectural beauty, only to suffer a series of political cataclysms at the beginning of the twentieth century that ended with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Soon afterward, the capital of the Soviet Union was moved back to Moscow, the original capital of Russia. Petersburg arose from treacherous terrain that Peter the Great chose in the extreme northwest of the country; this was to be the new Europeanized capital—the architectural space of his Westernization project. It came to be known as the window to Europe and would serve as the emblem of Russia as West. Hence the planned rectilinear capital, built on several islands in the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea with waterways running through the city and bridges crossing them. Because of these waterways and because of its beauty, Petersburg has often been called the Venice of the North. In the nineteenth-century debates of national identity between Westernizers and Slavophiles, who believed in Russia’s unique organic history, Moscow was put forth as emblematic Russian space. In opposition to Western rationalism, the Slavophiles argued for a spiritual national identity.

Bely’s Petersburg represents a high point of Russia’s dilemma of national identity in a work of literature by staging the quandary as one between East and West, both in geographical and contingent ideational terms. The Bronze Horseman, the city’s most famous monument, located on a pedestal high above the embankment on the Neva River, depicts the founder of St. Petersburg on a steed with front legs raised, as if ready to leap as he overlooks his city. The equestrian statue, considered the genius loci of Petersburg, plays a key role in Bely’s novel. The metallic Horseman’s imagined leap across history, cleaving Russia in two, engenders the narrator’s meditation on the apocalyptic return of the Mongols (“the yellow hordes of Asians”), who had occupied medieval Russia (Rus’) for nearly three centuries. The image references the Book of Revelation and its horde of horsemen from the East, which reflects Russian preoccupation both with its Asian identity and fear of Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, to which Bely gives voice. The leaping across space and time also invokes a contemporary historical event—the devastating 1904–1905 war Russia lost to Japan that intensified these fears, all of which contribute to Petersburg’s sense of doom.

As to the novel’s characters, the West/East opposition is most clearly represented by the father Apollon (Russian for Apollo, the Greek god who advances order and balance) Apollonovich (son of Apollo) Ableukhov and his son Nikolai Apollonovich. Their brief parodic genealogy offered at the beginning of the novel traces the origins of the family to Central Asia and the Mongols. Yet Senator Ableukhov, head of a government institution, is an arch Westernizer who appreciates Petersburg’s rectilinearity and whose personal space reflects his obsession with totalizing rational order: the objects of his everyday occupy positions on shelves that are carefully marked by Latin letters and the four directions of the earth; only the combinations northeast and northwest are referenced, as if to mark the geographical location of the imperial capital in the northwest. Apollon Apollonovich’s love of symmetry is reflected in his fondness of cubes and other geometric shapes. He fears the unshaped crowds on Nevsky Prospect, Petersburg’s main avenue, which he associates with the hated revolutionary masses from the islands that may invade the heart of the Russian capital.

The son’s identity interweaves East and West. The Ableukhovs’ Central Asian heredity informs one of his delirious dreams, in which Nikolai imagines both Apollon and himself as ancient Mongols (Turanians). In this Oedipal dream, the son battles his father. While Nikolai Apollonovich’s study is dominated by the bust of the Western philosopher Kant, he maintains a link to his Central Asian roots in his waking life as well, wearing a flowing multicolored Bukhara⁷ dressing gown, Tatar slippers, and skull cap, with his reception room decorated in eastern style, replete with an Oriental hookah.

The novel’s other Orientalized living space is decorated in Japanese style (Japonisme), popular throughout Europe, including Russia, in the later nineteenth century and beyond. It belongs to Nikolai’s heartthrob Sofia Petrovna. The landscapes of Mount Fujiyama by the famous nineteenth-century painter Katsushika Hokusai adorn the walls of her drawing room. Ironically, however, she can’t say his name correctly (Bely points this out in a footnote). But the bigger irony has to do with the Russo-Japanese War, which had just come to an end and in which Russia suffered a humiliating defeat.

More importantly, the Orientalist theme is significant in artistic terms; the narrator’s comment that Hokusai’s drawings lack the illusion of three-dimensional perspective reveals Bely’s concern with visual perspective and its various instantiations. Returning to Berdyaev’s claim that Petersburg is a cubist novel that flattens image-making, coeval cubist painting also dismantled linear perspective by flattening pictorial space, characteristic of the novel as well.

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The Russo-Japanese War, which Russia was expected to win easily, and the 1905 revolution serve as the historical backdrop of Petersburg. Revolution, represented in Petersburg as terrorist conspiracy, is set against reaction and tsarist bureaucracy, as revealed in the assassination plot against Apollon Apollonovich. The motor of Petersburg’s plot is the terrorist bomb and its impending explosion, expected to disperse terror in the coming urban apocalypse. The bomb, moreover, may be described as the motor of modernist representation as well as subtext of body parts displacing the body whole. Its imaginary and real explosions reveal the phantasmagoric aspects of modernity cum modernism that fragment and dissolve narrative and representation. At one point, Nikolai imagines himself to be a bomb, bursting and shattering the space around him. The source of the bomb metaphor is very likely Friedrich Nietzsche’s bold claim in Ecce Homo that he is dynamite. Bely’s description of his own creative process in 1911 says it best: “my creative work is a bomb that I throw; life inside me is a bomb that has been thrown at me; a bomb striking a bomb—showers of shrapnel . . . the shrapnel fragments of my work are the forms of art; shrapnel of the seen—images of necessity that explode my life.”⁸

Petersburg’s time bomb produces a sensory shock of the sort described by Simmel. It ticks, traverses real and imaginary space, marks time in the novel, and causes novelistic fragmentation: body parts displace the body whole; fragments of the cityscape, the city whole; fragments of narrative, the narrative whole. The narrative can be described as on the move, moving relentlessly toward the explosion of the bomb, which brings the plot to an end. Yet that movement is retarded by the spatialization of narrative, creating a sense that the novel takes place over a much longer period of time than it does. The bomb, in other words, motivates the disruption of narrative that moves back and forth in time, resulting in a text that requires readerly concentration in attempting to piece its parts together into something resembling a whole. In a later novel, Bely would write that “every novel plays hide and seek with the reader.”⁹

Evno Azef, the historical prototype of the novel’s chief conspirator Lippanchenko, was the organizer of several important assassinations in Russia, and like Azef, it is implied that Lippanchenko is a double agent, meaning that he works both for the revolutionaries and the secret police, official agents of state surveillance. If the senator and police represent the state apparatus of surveillance, Lippanchenko embodies the revolutionary conspiracy’s surveillance mechanism at its most duplicitous.

Terrorist conspiracy in the face of Lippanchenko is also associated with the East. He is described by the narrator and others as a Mongol. The young revolutionary anarchist Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin is tormented by terrifying hallucinations of Lippanchenko as Mongol emerging from the yellow wallpaper in Dudkin’s garret room. Having enslaved his will, Lippanchenko orders him to deliver the time bomb hidden in a sardine tin to the senator’s son. In the end, however, instead of the senator, it is the chief conspirator who is killed by Dudkin, his instrument—a parodic pair of scissors: “his back had been slit open (this is how the hairless skin of a cold suckling pig with horseradish sauce is sliced)” (263). The repulsive Lippanchenko has been turned into an edible commodity, which is thoroughly disgusting. Afterward, we see Dudkin straddling his corpse, arm outstretched, scissors in hand, parodying the figure of the Bronze Horseman.

Dudkin’s vision of revolution has an Orientalizing dimension as well: he is a reader of the Book of Revelation, and his anarchist vision of destroying culture is associated with “summoning the Mongols.” He is visited by the demonic Persian Shishnarfne/Enfranshish who engenders another instance of remarkable hallucinatory metamorphosis that engages the shifting dimensions of the visitor’s body and dissolution of form. His three-dimensional body becomes two-dimensional, then a contour, then a line of soot on the windowsill, finally lodging as a sounding “dot” in Dudkin’s throat.

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Maps 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 setting and content were merely the “conventional dress of thought forms.” Yet he also referred to them as “cerebral play, suggesting that a possible title for the novel could be Cerebral Play.”¹⁶

While writing Petersburg, Bely became an ardent follower of Rudolf Steiner’s teachings of anthroposophy, an offshoot of theosophy, both of which were popular in European esoteric thought at the turn of the century. Among important contemporary artists influenced by anthroposophy were Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Steiner promoted an occult spirituality that included astral journeys—out-of-body experiences—premised on the existence of a phantasmal fourth dimension, a cosmic spatial concept of infinity and unboundedness. (The enigmatic Shishnarfne, a visitor from the astral sphere, claims that Petersburg exists in the shadowy fourth dimension.) Steiner developed a series of meditation exercises for the individual to experience the out-of-body astral journey, which Bely practiced while living in the anthroposophist colony in Dornach, Switzerland, leaving fascinating drawings of his meditations.¹⁷ Berdyaev, as we remember, referred to Petersburg’s cerebral processes as projections of the astral plane.

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Petersburg may be described as an exploration of the aversive emotion of disgust.¹⁸ The passage that depicts “suddenly” in the sub-chapter “And Besides, the Face Glistened” (23–24) represents such an exploration. It is perhaps the novel’s most remarkable passage linguistically. In it, an adverb that references time is nominalized and thereby spatialized, offering several visualized views, or perspectives, of it in motion. The narrator, moreover, tells us that it is the reader’s disgusting “suddenly” that he has in mind. Significantly, the passage precedes the novel’s first appearance of Lippanchenko, a formless fat man with repugnant yellow salmon lips (they suggest edibility that arouses the reader’s revulsion). “Suddenly” Dudkin turns around and sees him and feels slime oozing down his back.

Revulsion and anxiety characterize the sexual sphere in Petersburg. The slime oozing down Dudkin’s back has homophobic connotations if read as an emanation of Lippanchenko. Such an interpretation is premised on Dudkin’s later recollection of “a certain vile act” that he had performed when he first met Lippanchenko and that he affiliates with the onset of his anxiety-ridden hallucinations and generalized angst. His nightmares about it are associated with the senseless word enfranshish, whose meaning Dudkin comes to understand during the visit of Shishnarfne/Enfranshish, a palindrome symbolizing inversion. One of the Russian meanings of “shish,” the first and last syllable of the Persian’s reversible name, is the obscene gesture of the thumb between the index and middle fingers. As described earlier, the dissolution of the visitor results in his penetration of Dudkin’s body by lodging in the latter’s throat. His body is invaded not only by Enfranshish/Lippanchenko but also the Bronze Horseman in the form of molten metal, which suggest the repeated violation of Dudkin’s body. In this sense, the slime oozing down his back may be said to represent the first instance of such violation

We learn that Dudkin has never been in love with women and instead lusts for female body parts and parts of clothing—fetish objects, in other words. Significantly, this is followed by Dudkin’s memory of Lippanchenko appearing on his garret wallpaper. Explored by Freud, male fetishism was affiliated with same-sex desire at the turn of the twentieth century.

If homophobia seems to characterize Bely’s representation of homoerotic desire, the representation of heterosexual desire may be qualified as erotophobic and is equally disgusting. Apollon Apollonovich remembers his wedding night in terms of another “vile act,” which he describes as rape that was repeated for years; Nikolai was conceived during one of those lecherous nights. The son’s vision of his conception is equally disgusting: he remembers that he used to be called “his father’s spawn,” inspiring the hatred of his own body and feelings of shame that he projects onto his father—hence the son’s Oedipal, murderous desire and his pledge to the party to kill his father. Even though Nikolai is shown as deeply ambivalent about this promise, he has patricidal fantasies, in one of which he imagines his father’s sundered body as blood oozing down his bedroom wall with a shred of skin stuck in it.

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Scholars have described Petersburg as having a symphonic structure that together with its striking visual lens suggests the Wagnerian term Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts). Significant in this regard is that Bely titled his early lyrical prose—Symphonies, which like Petersburg exhibits a synesthetic approach to language, for instance referencing sight by means of sound. (Synesthesia is the fusion of the senses.) Writing in his memoirs that the novel emerged from a series of sounds and visual images, Bely claimed that he simply listened and spied on his future characters: “I didn’t invent anything; I only spied [podgliadyval] on the actions of the figures that appeared before me.”¹⁹

Bely was a leading member of the Russian Symbolist movement, which professed music as the highest art form, articulated by the nineteenth-century philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Bely’s first important essay, “Forms of Art” (1902), claims that the verbal arts should aspire to music. Most likely because of his symbolist affiliation and symbolist claims regarding verbal language, most Bely scholarship has considered the novel almost exclusively in relation to music. The one exception is its magnificent color palette. The musical structure of Petersburg consists of sound play, such as alliteration and onomatopoeia; general repetition of sounds, short and longer passages, some figured as leitmotifs; and rhythmically orchestrated passages, even whole pages, that deploy poetic meter. Except for the repetition of passages, these devices are of course difficult to translate into another language, although Robert Maguire and John Malmstad have done a yeoman’s job in trying to do so.

Equally important as music, if not more so, is Petersburg’s visual imagery, which is certainly more readily translatable. Robert Alter has described Petersburg as “an acutely visual novel,”²⁰ without, however, actually examining its visuality. Among its verbal renditions are the shifting cubist-like vantage points from which the phantasmagoric city, its inhabitants, and other, often unexpected, subject matter are represented. Such shifts produce a plurality of perspectives that the reader is called on to imagine and visualize, for instance, the characters’ as well as readers’ bird’s-eye view of the city from above, on the one hand, and street-level views of buildings, parks, rivers, and canals, on the other.²¹

Reading Petersburg through a visual lens reveals its imaginative postimpressionist, avant-garde, even abstract representation, for instance, of lines and circles. Here are two simple depictions of intersecting lines: Apollon Apollonovich “standing out sharply in a composition of lines, both gray and black . . . looked like an etching”; Nikolai’s thoughts were “sketching meaningless, idle arabesques of some kind.” (An arabesque is a flowing ornamental design in Islamic art.) The senator’s momentous ride to his office, during which he encounters Dudkin on Nevsky Prospect, offers a multiplicity of perspectives as his cube-like black carriage expands and soars above the intersecting linearity of Petersburg, as well as of shadowy people swarming on the prospect. The senator (or is it the narrator?) experiences the planet embraced by cubes of houses compared to serpent coils.

A discussion of Petersburg as a verbal text that inscribes visuality typically engages the nexus between language and painting, or picture-making, often by means of metaphors. In The Rhetoric, Aristotle claimed that metaphors have the power of “bringing something before the eyes,” suggesting the centrality of vision in metaphoric imagery. Among such images in Petersburg, which is highly metaphoric, are the swarm and cerebral play. They spatialize verbal narrative, defined by time, whereas space defines the visual arts. Metaphoric images inform the multiple metamorphoses of objects and people that the novel encourages us to visualize, as well as the dissolution of the novel’s words and sensible world. Perhaps the most remarkable visual image, one that exceeds its metaphoric representation, is that of the Bronze Horseman coming to Dudkin’s garret and flowing into his “veins in metals,” reminding us of Berdyaev’s claim that in in Petersburg “a man morphs into another man.” In fact, what we see in this scene is the fusion of the metallic Horseman and the young anarchist in what may be described as a surreal transmutation.

We may compare some of Bely’s metamorphic images to pigments that dissolve the novelistic world of Petersburg. The novel’s color palette is indeed very rich, revealing among other things the apocalyptic end of Petersburg. As in painting, especially of the modernist variety, colors bleed into each other. They are used in Bely’s grotesque, sometimes baroque representation of the dying city, standing in contrast to the city’s traditional image of classical Apollonian beauty. Among the most frequent colors is green—green mists; green faces and ears, including the senator’s large vampiric ears; greenish swarm; and the germ-infested green waters of the Neva that are linked to disease. Red and its variants, including bloody, are the color of doom and revolution, for example, the foreboding city sunsets and Nikolai’s red domino costume. Grey and black are associated especially with the senator; yellow, with Lippanchenko—it is the color of the wallpaper in Dudkin’s garret and the insomnia from which he suffers; and so on.

Petersburg’s architecture is essentially baroque and neoclassicist. The city’s and characters’ recurring transmutations in Petersburg are typically rendered by means of images that we may call modernist baroque, or neobaroque, characterized by excess, grotesque imagery, motion, irregularity, and dissolution of form. Among such examples are the Nevsky crowd mutating into slimy, oozing fish eggs, with the sidewalk becoming a caviar sandwich, and “suddenly” oozing down Dudkin’s back. The phantasmagoric transformation of the Bronze Horseman is perhaps Petersburg’s most extravagant metamorphosis, one that is baroque in contrast to the original classicist equestrian sculpture. This pertains especially to its entering Dudkin’s body in metals, a horrific image of transmutation. Contrary to the Russian imperial city’s architectural history, in which classicist order triumphed over the baroque, Bely’s novel marks baroque’s triumphant return.

Turning once again to Berdyaev, the philosopher describes Petersburg as a cubo-futurist novel (cubo-futurism is the term for Russian cubism). Futurism in literature emerged as a reaction against symbolism in the early 1910s, which coincided with the writing of Petersburg. More than earlier literary movements, futurism aligned language with visual representation. Bely, according to Berdyaev, combined “cubism and futurism with a genuine and unmediated symbolism.” He even claims that Bely is the only important futurist in Russian literature.

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If Petersburg represents radical literary innovation, it also references some of the best-known works of Russian literature that inform the “Petersburg text,” created, so to speak, by the city itself.²² The novel may be described as a virtual compendium of the self-referential Petersburg text cum myth, ranging from Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman and novella The Queen of Spades, to Gogol’s sinister Petersburg Tales, to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and so on. All of them are defined by walking, running, and riding on Petersburg’s shadowy streets, with the characters mapping different locales of the city. Regarding urban space, the Petersburg text predictably was originally set in the aristocratic city center and moved gradually to the peripheries in the course of the nineteenth century, so that Crime and Punishment takes place only in marginal locales, including the islands, not classical city sites. Bely’s novel includes both.

Petersburg certainly corroborates the claim by Dostoevsky’s Underground Man that the imperial capital is “the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world.”²³ Indeed, its rational, planned character is both represented and problematized in Bely’s city novel. What Bely takes from his forebears is the intentional, fantastic, and apocalyptic vision of Petersburg in which statues come to life to haunt its inhabitants (The Bronze Horseman); the devil lights the gas street lamps on Nevsky Prospect (Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect”); and an impoverished young man with radical ideas kills a predatory old woman (Crime and Punishment).

Gogol’s other imagery travels to Petersburg as well, for instance, the anonymous crowd in “Nevsky Prospect.” Gogol was also Bely’s predecessor in fragmenting the human body, such as the separation of the nose from the face of its owner: in “The Nose” from Petersburg Tales, the nose of a civil servant assumes a life of its own. Bely’s posthumously published Gogol’s Artistry (1935), one of the most insightful studies of Gogol, devotes twenty pages to his influence on Bely. As an example, he references Lippanchenko’s face creeping out of a yellow spot on the wallpaper in Dudkin’s garret. Gogol’s Artistry, moreover, is Bely’s most complete study of color.

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Written between 1911 and 1913, Petersburg was first serialized in 1913–1914, then published in book form in 1916. Bely revised it while living in Berlin, producing a much shorter version of the novel in 1922.²⁴ It appeared in the Soviet Union in 1928 with additional cuts by censors, then posthumously in 1935. The novel’s treatment of subject matter and modernist form became unacceptable in the Stalinist era, dominated by socialist realism, which relegated Petersburg to oblivion. As a result, discussion of Petersburg in Soviet literary criticism could only appear abroad until the late 1970s: the censored short version was first republished in the Soviet Union in 1978 (coinciding with the Maguire and Malmstad English translation), the original 1916 novel, in 1981.

The Maguire and Malmstad translation you are about to read is of the Berlin edition. Its translators consider it the better and definitive version of the novel, with which I would agree. Their reasons include the shorter edition’s tighter structure, “terseness, compactness of exposition, and brevity” (xxiv), as well as reduction of superfluous repetition and of the anthroposophical dimension, all of which are true. Yet the longer version is easier to follow because its narrative is less fragmented and elliptical. The reader of the later edition must work harder in piecing the narrative together. As I suggested, she should become a detective with the purpose of uncovering that which is hidden.

The original longer version has been translated into English three times: by John Cournos in 1959, David McDuff in 1995, and John Elsworth in 2009. Maguire and Malmstad’s translation, however, remains the best English-language translation of either version of Petersburg. Why? It offers the most accurate stylistic rendition of Bely’s striking modernist style, notoriously difficult to translate. The reviewer of the translation in The New York Review of Books wrote in 1978 that it captures “Bely’s idiosyncratic language and the rhythm of his prose, and, without doing violence to English, conveys not only the literal meaning of the Russian but also its echoes and implications.” Maguire and Malmstad themselves write that even though Petersburg’s sound plays and rhythms are “impossible to render ‘literally,’” they have attempted to render them by means of suggestion, “sometimes even creating instances of sound play where none exists at precisely that point in the Russian text.”

The reader has made the right choice in selecting this translation of Petersburg also because it is the only one with commentary regarding Bely’s complex novel and its literary and historical contexts. Although the reader may choose not to use it, the excellent appendix will help you with the difficult passages and thereby increase readerly comprehension and pleasure. For all these reasons, it is Maguire and Malmstad’s version that remains the translation universally used in teaching the novel.

Olga Matich