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,