Such a multiplicity of functions tends to pull the characters out of themselves. Like many modern writers, Bely does not attempt anything resembling full psychological portraits. Ultimately there are no private thoughts or private actions; all are reflexes of larger realities, which in turn are experienced by all the characters. Even something as concrete as a tic or a gesture may be shared by a number of otherwise seemingly different personages. For instance, Dudkin’s favorite posture, when alone in his garret and unable to sleep, is to flatten himself against the wall with arms outstretched; Lippanchenko does the same just before he is killed by Dudkin, who then mimics the statue of Peter the Great (an important character in the novel) by straddling the corpse, as Peter does his horse. Yet it is Bely’s great achievement to make these characters seem real and memorable as individuals. He endows each with certain striking physical traits which he repeats again and again by way of imprinting them on our memories: Apollon Apollonovich has large greenish ears, a bald head, and a puny physique; Sofia Petrovna possesses luxuriant tresses and an incipient mustache; Lippanchenko is obese and has a low, narrow forehead. Nearly all the characters bear “meaningful” names as well: Apollon is the Russian for “Apollo”; Ableukhov contains the word for “ear” (ukho); Lippanchenko draws on the morpheme lip—, which can make the word for “sticky.” Each character has his own skew of temperament, which helps determine which aspects of the vast reality of the novel he will tend to see. And Bely surrounds him with an array of objects that serve as correlatives to his outlook. Apollon Apollonovich relishes the icy symmetries of the formal rooms of his mansion, which reflect his passion for the abstractions of geometry. His son lives in three very different rooms, which suggests greater temperamental complexity: the study, with its bookshelves and its bust of Kant, mirrors his yearning for systems and his penchant for abstraction (both “western” traits); the sleeping room, which is almost entirely taken up by a huge bed, objectifies and is meant to exorcise his Oedipal obsession with the “sin” of his conception; and the reception room, with its oriental motifs, gratifies the “eastern” side of his character which emerges after his mother runs off with her lover. For many of these devices Bely is heavily indebted to his great predecessors; but he has achieved a synthesis that is unmistakably personal.
Bely’s characters, then, are both general and particular, abstract and concrete, unreal and real, at one and the same time. This unity in duality is characteristic of every aspect of the novel. Consider the matter of time. The novel as a whole unfolds between September 30 and October 9, 1905. Although these dates are not specified, they can readily be established if we note the wealth of detail Bely introduces (much of it from the daily press) on current events and the vagaries of the weather. Once the bomb begins ticking, in Chapter V, we are forced to think in terms of the twenty-four-hour period within which it is set to explode. All this gives us a sense of being firmly planted in time and in space. Yet the chronology is constantly warped: characters and events from the literature and history of the past move into 1905; there are sudden shifts into a distant unspecified future time, and even into the timeless realm of myth. We come to see that time and timelessness are both “real” in this novel; the one does not exclude the other.
The same point can be made about the city itself. As Bely recreates it, it is as familiar to any Russian as London or Paris is to an Englishman or Frenchman. Through a careful and lavish specification of the peculiarities of climate, geography, and prominent architectural features, Bely manages to convey a sense of the actual physical presence of the city, making it so vivid and “real” that sometimes we almost think we are reading a gloss on Baedeker. (At the same time, we understand that Petersburg represents the modern city generally.) Yet it has a curiously elusive quality. To be sure, the great public buildings and the famous monuments are all located where they should be, and remain fixed throughout. But other external, man-made features tend to be as fluid as the waters that run through, around, and beneath the city itself: when we try to plot them on a map, we find, for instance, that the Ableukhov house occupies three very different locations, that the Likhutin house is an “impossible” composite of several others, and that the government institution headed by the senator cannot be even approximately situated, even though all three of these buildings are described in considerable detail.4
In fact, Bely readily acknowledges his debt to the version of Petersburg that has been shaped by Russian literature. Writers of the eighteenth century tended to see Petersburg as a magnificent monument to the power of human reason and will: it was a planned city, founded in 1703 and built on a trackless bog. Part I of Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” (1833) honors this point of view; but Part II strikes a new note that came to predominate in virtually all literary treatments of Petersburg well into the twentieth century: beneath the “western” facade lay a shadowy world of intangibilities and unrealities, alien to man’s reason and apprehensible only to his unconscious being—an “eastern” world, in the Russian terminology. It was Petersburg, with its uneasy coexistence of “west” and “east,” that appealed to the Russian mind as being emblematic of the larger problem of national identity. Readers of Gogol and Dostoevsky are familiar with this double view. It characterizes Bely’s novel too. He takes all the literary myths of Petersburg, which Dostoevsky called “the most fantastic and intentional city in the world,” and brings them to culmination.
Each of the characters in Petersburg participates in the enactment and perpetuation of the myth of the city—none more vigorously and meaningfully than the Bronze Horseman. The subject of the statue, Peter the Great, was a real man and a historical figure. In his efforts to shatter and update the Russia he inherited, he was a revolutionary; yet at the same time he created the bureaucracy by which the reforms were rigidified into the self-perpetuating authority of the state. In the single-minded tyranny with which he acted, he was an “eastern” despot; but in his vision of a modern state he was “western.” As the “father” of Russia, he is the ultimate symbol of the paternal authority against which the “sons” rebel in various ways. At the same time, he has a literary dimension, as the main subject of Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” which is constantly invoked throughout Bely’s novel; the Horseman, in turn, is the most famous monument in Petersburg, and is in effect a symbol of the city. In the novel, Peter is alive and ever-present in all these manifestations—a point Bely reinforces not only by bringing the statue to life (Pushkin does that too), but also by tying Peter in with the all pervasive theme of generational conflict and revolution, with the literary myth of the city, and with the apocalyptic destiny he sees awaiting Russia.
The Bronze Horseman is the most perceptive character in the novel. But most of the others are intelligent enough to see that they are not self-contained, that they participate, whether wishing to or not, in the workings of a larger reality that exists independent of them. This reality is sometimes referred to in the novel as “abyss” or “void.” Occasionally a character is vouchsafed a disturbing glimpse into it, in dreams, at the moment of death, or at times of great stress which pull him out of his routines and, in the words of a recent critic, “bring him into contact with the universe [literally, ‘world-structure,’ mirozdanie] and turn him into a ‘particle’ of the universe too. There, beyond the bounds of the visible world, man falls into the powers of a ‘timeless’ stream of time, in which are grouped events and persons of not only past but also future epochs.”5 Such an experience is profoundly unsettling to Bely’s characters, for it threatens to undo their identities as individuals. By way of resistance, they construct a world of objects with definite shapes and functions, whether the city itself, representing Peter’s attempt at self-assertion and self-definition, or the more modest houses, apartments, and rooms that his heirs inhabit. All relish what they can touch and see—the visible, the finite, the specific—or what they can construct out of their own heads—systems, categories, propositions. But the narrator