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