Pe tersb urg / Pe t er s bu r g

Petersburg/ Petersburg

Novel and City, 1900–1921

Edit ed by

  

The University of Wisconsin Press

 Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part,
through support from
the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters and Science
at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The University of Wisconsin Press

1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
uwpress.wisc.edu

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England
eurospanbookstore.com

Copyright © 2010
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without written permission
of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical
articles and reviews.

1 3 5 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Matich, Olga.
Petersburg/Petersburg : novel and city, 1900–1921 / Olga Matich.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-299-23604-5 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-299-23603-8 (e-book)
1. Bely, Andrey, 1880–1934. Peterburg.
2. Saint Petersburg (Russia)—In literature.
3. Saint Petersburg (Russia)—History—20th century.
I. Title.
DK552.M38 2010
947´.21083—dc22
2010011538
 Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Preface ix

Introduction 3
     

Par t O n e: Pe tersb urg , t he N ove l

1 Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance 31
     
2 Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Petersburg 55
     
3 Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 83
     

Par t Two : Pet e r sburg, t he Cit y

4 “The Streetcar Prattle of Life”: Reading and
Riding St. Petersburg’s Trams 123
     
5 How Terrorists Learned to Map: Plotting
in Petersburg and Boris Savinkov’s Recollections
of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse 149
  and            
6 The Enchanted Masquerade: Alexander Blok’s
The Puppet Show from the Stage to the Streets 174
         

v
vi Contents

7 Panoramas from Above and Street from Below:

The Petersburg of Vyacheslav Ivanov and
Mikhail Kuzmin 194
        
8 The Button and the Barricade: Bridges in Paris and
Petersburg 217
     
9 28 Nevsky Prospect: The Sewing Machine,
the Seamstress, and Narrative 238
     
10 Meat in Russia’s Modernist Imagination 262
    
11 The Fluid Margins: Flâneurs of the Karpovka River 283
         
12 The Voices of Silence: The Death and Funeral
of Alexander Blok 305
         -    

Concluding Remarks 327

     
Postscript. St. Petersburg: New Architecture and
Old Mythology 332
      

Contributors 343
Index 345
 Illustrations

Cover of inaugural issue of Voron 40

Olga Rozanova, cover of Vzorval’ 41
Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son 58
Francesco Cabianca, Saturn 60
Edvard Munch, The Scream 71
Andrey Bely, Nikolay Apollonovich Ableukhov 72
Cover of Shtyk 89
Wassily Kandinsky, The Last Judgment 91
Andrey Bely, Angel 92
Wassily Kandinsky, Diagonal Tensions and Countertensions with a Point 98
Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, October Idyll 102
Wassily Kandinsky, Moscow 104
Wassily Kandinsky, Lady in Moscow 105
Vague Selfish Affection 106
Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, Barbershop Window 108
Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, City Types 109
Wassily Kandinsky, Black Spot 110
Map of St. Petersburg’s tram network 126
Cover of Osip Mandelshtam’s Dva tramvaia 138
Nicholas II 182
Masquerade ball at the home of Countess Kleinmikhel 183
Tauride Palace and Tauride Gardens 201
Rotating drawbridge of Trinity Bridge 219
Alexander III Bridge 221
Advertisement for the Singer sewing machine 243
Russian Singer Girl 244

vii
viii I llustrations

Karl Bulla, photograph of woman in Russian national costume 245

Cover of Singer Family Calendar 247
Butchers at work at Aux Gourmets, St. Petersburg 264
Still shot from Dziga Vertov, Kino-glaz 278
Grenadier regiment barracks on Karpovka Embankment 290
Dmitry Mitrokhin, On Karpovka 299
Eric Owen Moss Architects, design for Mariinsky Theater 335
RMJM Group, design for Gazprom Tower 339
 Preface

My interest in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg is longstanding. I have taught the

premier novel of Russian modernism throughout my academic career, but
only recently have I ventured to subject it to serious examination. The initial
impetus for this work was Russian Modernism and Its International Legacy, the very
ambitious and beautifully designed Web site by Scott Mahoy that is being
constructed at the University of Southern California by the Labyrinth Project,
which is directed by noted film and new media scholar Marsha Kinder. I was
one of the members of the original team, consisting of Marsha, the art historian
John Bowlt, and film scholar Yuri Tsivian, that conceptualized the multimedia
digital teaching resource. Inspired by new ways of thinking about narrative and
by the possibilities of the digital medium, I started an informal graduate semi-
nar at Berkeley on the relationship of the novel Petersburg and the coeval capital
of late imperial Russia. From it emerged the Web site Mapping Petersburg, which
the authors of this volume created together with Web designers Chris Palma-
tier of the Berkeley Language Center and Irina Kuzes, an independent de-
signer. I invite you to visit the Web site at any point while reading “Petersburg”/
Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921.1
One of the unusual aspects of the Petersburg project is not that a novel
gave rise to a Web site, but that the Web site engendered the scholarly book
that you are about to read. The reverse would have been the more common se-
quence. The printed book and electronic site while closely related can be read
and used without reference to the other, although in tandem they offer a new,
richer intellectual experience. Please see the introduction for the description of
“Petersburg”/Petersburg and the concluding remarks for a discussion of Mapping
Petersburg. We hope that the volume cum Web site will be of interest not only

ix
x Preface

to students and scholars in the Russian field but also to readers interested in
modernism and modernity as well as in the study of cities.2
The book is divided into two parts: Bely’s novel is the focus of part 1, of
which I am the author; the city of St. Petersburg is the focus of part 2, which
was written by current and former graduate students in Russian literature and
Russian history at the University of California at Berkeley. This multiyear col-
laboration, including on the Web site, has been one of the most satisfying and
intellectually stimulating endeavors of my academic life. I hope that the reader
will find the results illuminating too, not only as scholarship and as a teaching
resource but also as a potential model for working with students. Over the
years we met four to five times a semester, sometimes more, reading and dis-
cussing studies of St. Petersburg from the beginning of the twentieth century as
well as contemporary scholarship on new approaches to the study of cities. We
also met to comment on each other’s work. Even though some of the students
have gone on to teach and moved elsewhere, the intensive collaboration has
continued, and even though finishing a Web site is notoriously difficult, ours is
finished.
The process of searching for new and interesting corners of St. Petersburg’s
history and topography that had not been uncovered before has been a truly
exhilarating aspect of this project. Especially rewarding were the wonderful
moments of serendipity resulting from the discovery of unexpected new verbal
and visual material that we came to associate with the negotiation of cities,
their traversal by residents and visitors. We came to regard such moments of
serendipity as resembling the Web experience.
The Division of Humanities at Berkeley has made the original project
possible by helping fund the construction of the Web site. I would like to single
out Mark Kaiser, the associate director of the Berkeley Language Center, who
provided us with the necessary equipment, and for making Chris Palmatier,
the Web site’s original designer, available to the project. The authors of this
volume owe a debt of gratitude to Chris for having launched the Web site. Our
gratitude also goes to Irina Kuzes, who agreed to finish designing the Web site
for less than her standard fee because of her interest in the subject. Irina was
indefatigable in her detailed precision and in her timely completion of the site.
I wish to thank my research assistants during this period, all of whom were
also involved in the Petersburg project as participants in the seminar and then
as authors of the Web site or book, in most instances of both: Mieka Erley,
Stiliana Milkova, Cameron Wiggins, and especially Lucas Stratton and Alyson
Tapp. I am grateful to Marsha Kinder for spearheading Russian Modernism,
which led to Petersburg in all the forms it has taken in my scholarship and
Preface xi

teaching. Finally, Gwen Walker, the editor at Wisconsin University Press, who
supported the publication of this volume through its various stages, deserves
our warm thanks for her thoughtful and always timely advice.


1. Mapping Petersburg (http://petersburg.berkeley.edu/index.html) essentially covers
the same time period as Russian Modernism and Its International Legacy (http://www.russian
modernism.org/), which has clearly defined pedagogical goals and includes creative as-
signments to be used individually or in the classroom. It has such a pathway for Bely’s
Petersburg, as well as pathways for the Russian visual and cinematic arts and for cultural
history, some of which—those that are relevant to our Web site—can also be accessed
directly from Mapping Petersburg.
2. Except in instances where another form of romanization has become common
usage, we romanize the Cyrillic in Russian names, both personal and topographic, in
accordance with the simplified Library of Congress transliteration system (fg, yg > y,
ë > yo, ] > ya, | > yu, g > y, soft and hard signs in the middle of words > y). Unless
otherwise indicated, the contributors have provided the translations from Petersburg and
other Russian texts.
Petersb urg / Pet e r s bu r g
 Introduction
    

Peripety, or reversal of fortune, punctuates the history of Petersburg, the impe-

rial capital of Russia, and of Andrey Bely’s (1880–1934) modernist novel of the
same name. The city arose from treacherous terrain that Peter the Great chose
in the extreme northwest of the country for his new Europeanized capital. In
the prologue of Petersburg, the narrator, adding to speculation about the city’s
idiosyncratic existence, proclaims that “if Petersburg is not the capital, then
there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist. However that may be, Peters-
burg 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.”1 Bely’s
novel, according to the narrator, surges from a dot on the map as if to assert the
direct affiliation of novelistic writing and mapping in a city that has a long
textual history. It would become known in Russian literature as the “Petersburg
text,” which has shadowed the actual city since the nineteenth century.
The city of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703, rose from the formidable marshy
terrain around the Gulf of Finland to rival other European capitals in grandeur
and architectural beauty, only to suffer a series of cataclysmic peripeties at the
beginning of the twentieth century: a renaming at the beginning of the First
World War, when it became Petrograd, to suppress Petersburg’s Germanic ety-
mology; the loss of status after the Bolshevik revolution, when the capital was
moved to Moscow; and the loss of its original affiliation with the name Peter,
when Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in honor of the new revolutionary
myth associated with Lenin and with the city as the “cradle of revolution.”
In keeping with the eschatological myth of Petersburg—and its cataclysmic

3
4       

demise—the city was gradually stripped of its identity. The most horrific perip-
ety for its residents was the Leningrad Blockade during the Second World War,
when the city literally starved and froze for nine hundred days.2 Yet after the
fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the city repossessed its original name and much
of its external splendor.
Despite the peripeties, the heart of St. Petersburg has essentially managed
to maintain its eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century appearance—a com-
bination of baroque and neoclassical architecture—even though the city’s
architectural face was contested periodically. In the words of Michel de Cer-
teau, Petersburg is the kind of city that has mastered “the art of growing old by
playing on all its pasts.”3 During the period examined in “Petersburg”/Petersburg:
Novel and City, 1900–1921, the city’s architectural visage was contested by style
moderne (Russian art nouveau), which Nikolay Antsiferov, one of Petersburg’s
leading preservationists at the beginning of the twentieth century, lamented,
referring to the “anti-architectural style of style moderne [as] a sickly growth on
the majestic organism of the city.”4 The exemplar of this style was the House of
Singer on Nevsky Prospect, Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. The building was
constructed by the American sewing machine company between 1902 and
1904 on the site of an original eighteenth-century building demolished by the
American company. As the firm’s headquarters in Russia, the House of Singer,
a high-end office building, became an emblem of modernity and of the city’s
burgeoning capitalist economy. Like the city itself, the House of Singer was
renamed after the revolution—the House of Books—and became the largest
bookstore in Leningrad. And like the city, it has recuperated its original name
and original grandeur recently, becoming a regular stop on the city tour as a
landmark of two of Petersburg’s pasts, prerevolutionary and Soviet, as well as
its post-Soviet capitalist present. Tourists and residents alike can sit in the cafe
on the second floor and through its bay window enjoy the largely unchanged
panoramic view of the beautiful historical city.
Characterizing the history of the city, peripety also marks the publication
history of Petersburg, written between 1911 and 1913; the first book version of the
novel appeared in 1916 (the Sirin edition).5 Although it was immediately ac-
claimed as a major work of Russian literature, critics did not recognize the full
extent of the novel’s groundbreaking literary experiment, which would later in-
fluence such Soviet writers as Evgeny Zamyatin, Boris Pilnyak, Boris Paster-
nak, Viktor Shklovsky, Konstantin Vaginov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrey
Platonov. At the time of Bely’s death in 1934, Zamyatin and Pasternak would
proclaim him the equal of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, both of whose mas-
terpieces appeared after Petersburg.6 Many years later, Vladimir Nabokov
I nt rod uc t ion 5

would name Petersburg as one of the four literary masterpieces of the twentieth
century, alongside Ulysses, the first half of In Search of Lost Time, and Franz
Kafka’s Metamorphosis.7
Bely revised and shortened the novel in 1922, during his peripatetic sojourn
in Berlin, and published it there serially. This shorter version of Petersburg—with
additional cuts by Soviet censors—was published twice during Stalin’s time:
in 1928 and, posthumously, in 1935. Afterward, in the era of Stalinist cultural
politics, which suppressed most forms of modernism, Petersburg was removed
from circulation, and the 1928 edition was returned to the Russian reader only
in 1978; the longer, prerevolutionary 1916 version, only in 1981. The canonic
English translation (of the shorter version) by Robert Maguire and John Malm-
stad appeared in 1978 and is still in print.8 As a result of its suppression in the
Soviet Union for more than forty years, public discussion of Petersburg only
appeared abroad until the late 1970s. Despite the extensive corpus of important
historical and textual criticism, the novel still awaits a more complete reading
of its relation to modernism.9
Like the prerevolutionary capital, Bely’s novel is an exercise in peripety and
peripatetics, the latter meaning “movement or journeys hither and thither.”10
The city novel represents a peripatetic nexus of modernity and modernism,
which are characterized by fragmentation, contingent urban experience, and
overstimulated senses and nerves causing psychological disorientation. Georg
Simmel describes this relationship in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)
as “the rapid telescoping of changing images [. . .] and the unexpectedness of
violent stimuli.”11 Concerned with the emotions and nervous systems of city
dwellers, he defines modernity 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.”12 Simmel’s terms are remarkably similar to those of Bely’s
novel, in which motion characterizes narrative and the distinction of outer/
inner is demonstrably blurred, as are the consequences: the peripeties of the
characters’ shattered nerves and inability to distinguish between fantasy and
reality. Bely was familiar with the writings of the neo-Kantian sociologist,
which were avidly read by the music critic and his close friend Emil Medtner,
but we do not know which of Simmel’s works Bely knew.13
Petersburg ’s working classes and bomb-throwing revolutionaries, who in-
spired terror in Russia and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, exacer-
bate the experience of modernity as urban sensory shock. In the terms of the
novel’s aesthetic paradigm that originated in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy,
they pose a Dionysian threat to the aristocratic Apollonian metropolis (the
6       

Apollonian principle stands for rational form and order; the Dionysian, for ec-
stasy and chaos). Petersburg, set during the 1905 Revolution, is represented as a
phantasmagoric dreamworld in flux, as if portending Walter Benjamin’s 1935
description of Paris of the Second Empire based in part on Baudelaire’s writing.
Despite the manifest intersection of modernity and modernism in Petersburg,
there are no serious studies of their dialectical relationship, including in regard
to the city or vice versa—of coeval St. Petersburg in relation to Bely’s novel.
Nor has anyone offered a sustained inquiry into the novel’s genre, affect, and
affiliation with the visual arts. “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921,
which is divided into two parts, attempts to do both. Part 1 is devoted to a new
reading of Petersburg as a detective novel, as an exploration in disgust, and as a
painterly avant-garde text, all of which are considered in regard to the city.
Part 2, whose starting point is Bely’s novel, is a study in cultural geography,
literary criticism, and the subjective experience of space with the purpose of
illuminating the late imperial capital from new vantage points. The essays ex-
amine Petersburg’s unexplored everyday life and material, political, and liter-
ary culture through the prism of the city as text: its everyday activities, architec-
ture, and material objects that inform narrative and the ways the city of the
belle époque allows itself to be read (or not); the relationship of public and pri-
vate space; and the more general affinity of urban space, modernity, and liter-
ary modernism. The essays are linked to a Web site titled Mapping Petersburg, a
virtual part 3, which traces related pathways through the coeval city.14

Urba n Pha nt a sma gor i a

Much has been written about Benjamin’s phantasmagoria—his metaphor of

modernity originating in the magic-lantern show and urban spectacle of real
and imagined images and shadowy apparitions—and about his critique of
commodity fetishism as defined by Marx. Benjamin’s famous statement that
the “world dominated by its phantasmagorias [. . .] is ‘modernity’”15 resonates
with Bely’s evocation of the city in an eponymous 1907 essay as a sinister living
organism that “has transformed the city dweller into a shadow: the shadow,
however, did not suspect that it was spectral.”16 The image would travel to
Petersburg in a few years—whose streets “flow in the veins like a fever.” Bely
studied Marx in the mid-1900s and made references to the commodity fetish in
his own writing.17 The essay figures the modern city as a harlot hurling hand-
fuls of “diamonds, sapphires, and rubies at the sides of buildings” that flash on
and off as they advertise the commodity fetish in the city’s shop windows:
I nt rod uc t ion 7

“Here is the outline of ‘Omega’ [watches], like a constellation, flickering ruby

lights from the top of a five-story building.”18 Such images of Nevsky Prospect
will also appear in the novel. What is most striking about this essay, however, is
the affiliation of the sinister glittering city with cinema, the new visual technol-
ogy that seems best able to represent modernity’s phantasmagoric spectacle of
shock experience. The affiliation moreover would be reified in the 1920s when
Bely himself adapted the novel to the screen, although the film was never made.
As Yury Tsivian writes, Bely refers to contemporary trick films in the essay
on the city, including W. R. Booth’s 1906 The “?” Motorist, whose peripetic and
peripatetic plot he describes in some detail: the wild ride of an automobile
through the city and its subsequent fantastic flight in which electric signboard
lights morph into meteors—an image that will travel to the novel as well.19 The
eponymous city in Petersburg is emblematically modern, referencing electricity,
automobiles, telephone, telegraph, and (albeit anachronistic) electric tram—
the grids of modernity that map city space.

S pac e a nd Time, M a ps, Po i n t o f Vi ew

One of the key cultural questions regarding historical and contemporary cities
is the relationship of time and space in urban cultures. In 1967 Foucault
claimed that contrary to the nineteenth century’s obsession with history,

[ T]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in
the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of
the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I
believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing
through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its
own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating
present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined
inhabitants of space.20

Instead of development in time, Foucault privileges spatial contiguity, multi-

plicity, and an ocular paradigm, foregrounding the displacement of time by
space, also emphasized by his older contemporary Henri Lefebvre.21 Building
on Foucault’s claim, the prominent postmodern social theorist Edward Soja
emphasizes the importance of geography and the spatial imagination in the
study of cities: “Geography may not yet have displaced history at the heart of
contemporary theory and criticism, but there is a new animating polemic [. . .
around] the interplay of history and geography, the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’
8       

dimensions of being in the world freed from the imposition of inherent categor-
ical privilege,” that according to Soja have allowed us to revise “the relations
between history, geography, and modernity.”22
The essential claim of this volume in this regard is that Petersburg and
Bely’s novel as spatial structures can be studied productively against and in re-
gard to each other. In this it follows Bely’s lead—that the city and novel are in-
extricably linked by a dot on the map, the original spatial record of a city, from
whose “point swarms the printed book.” According to Shklovsky, Bely’s fiction
represents a novelistic shift from plot to complex image-making—a spatial
endeavor, which Shklovsky associates with one of Bely’s favorite images—the
“swarm,” likening it to the “disintegration of form in a cubist painting [. . .] a
series of shards” that create a meaningful whole only very gradually.23 The
image, moreover, connotes an anthill or beehive, a metaphor for the novel’s
unshaped human mass that subverts the sense of cartographic clarity (and
linearity) proclaimed by the narrator of the prologue. In this sense the swarm
portends the novel’s illegible, or unreadable, anonymous circulating crowds as
it announces its key spatial concern: motion that is related both to a readable
cartographic view as well as to a view that cannot be read. It is as if at the end
of the prologue we descend from a bird’s-eye view of Petersburg (and of Russia)
into the thickness of a bustling city, defined by the circulation of language in the
form of Bely’s novel (and endless bureaucratic circulars), and into the density of
the circulating anonymous crowd on Nevsky and working masses from the is-
lands threatening to cross the bridges from the islands.
Maps by definition picture geographic space from a bird’s-eye view, im-
posing spatial order on unruly space. Their vantage point represents a position
of surveillance and control—what Foucault and then de Certeau defined as
panoptic vision—as well as of exploration and conquest of new terrain. In re-
gard to the mapping of cities, Soja writes that “every city is to some degree a
panopticon, a collection of surveillance modes designed to impose and main-
tain a particular model of conduct and disciplined adherence on its inhabi-
tants,” in which the centralized state has played an ever growing role.24 When
used as a navigation tool at street level, maps can be said to manage the human
swarm by making the city readable as they organize individual itineraries
through the city by visitors and residents. In the instance of some major metrop-
olises, Google Maps has made the relationship between the two mapping views
of the city vividly palpable with actual street-level views of the city.
Bely’s Petersburg reflects the panoptic view of the city, not only in abstract
terms—by referencing the map and official circulars—but also in the ubiqui-
tous presence of policemen on the streets, guarding official buildings and
I nt rod uc t ion 9

monuments, and of detectives, as well as double agents, who simultaneously en-

able and subvert the policing function of this modernist Petersburg text. As Rob-
ert Alter suggests in Imagined Cities, Bely has created a disjuncted urban narrative
that resembles “the suspense-generating mechanism of the detective novel” set
in a modern metropolis in which “there are menacing forces at work, lurking
dangers, dark mysteries to be solved.”25 Spies police the human centipede—the
swarm—into which the young revolutionary Alexander Dudkin disappears—
to become part of the crowd described as “viscous flowing sediment.”
Petersburg tells the story of a detective terrorist-cum-Oedipal plot against a
high-level bureaucrat and keeper of order, appropriately named Apollon Apol-
lonovich. Detective fiction, a product of urban space, represents authorial de-
sire for making the labyrinthine city—which Bely’s certainly is, despite its recti-
linear prospects—and its secrets readable, despite their surface impenetrability.
Petersburg ’s characters literally map the novel’s topography26 as they walk, run,
travel by carriage and confront each other on Petersburg’s streets, squares, and
bridges, passing by its most familiar landmarks as well as its dark byways and
alleys. The novel’s spatial epistemology is defined by several kinds of grids,
starting with the map and the concept of perspective and order, which repre-
sent Apollonian control and surveillance. Yet the exploding bomb—the motor
of the plot—and its imaginary and real aesthetic shock reify the simultaneously
terrifying and fascinating aspect of modernity, defined as Dionysian, that frag-
ments and dissolves narrative and representation, what can be described as an
anarchist, or terrorist, sublime that exceeds representation. Bely’s source for
the bomb metaphor is very likely Nietzsche’s bold claim in Ecce Homo that he is
dynamite.
If we consider the Apollonian and Dionysian opposition in spatial terms,
they can be said to represent two different points of view: the first apprehended
from a distance and providing a panoramic perspective; the second, a close-up
defined by an experiential perspective. Panoramic views of Petersburg, with its
wide straight avenues and grand squares, were inscribed into the city’s archi-
tectural face from the beginning. Any city, its built environments and inhabi-
tants, can be seen both from a panoramic distance and from what resembles a
cinematic close-up in which representation is fragmented and contours may
be blurred, though distance can have a similar effect of distorting the “real.”
Yet contrary to de Certeau, the close-up is readable in ways that offer new
insight despite the distortion. So even though the close-up view typically pro-
vokes a subjective response—which de Certeau associates with blindness and
unreadability on the part of the pedestrian walking the city—it may also be
seen as an alternate modernist view of reality that the reader is challenged to
10       

make intelligible. The binary spatial opposition of distance/close-up, especially

the dizzying shifts of visual vantage points from which Bely represents the city
and its inhabitants, produces a plurality of perspectives that the reader is called
upon to imagine and experience. As in modernist painting, the distance between
viewer and viewed is problematized. This contests perspectivalized space, for
instance by foreshortening it; it also contests the hegemony of vision, for instance
by engaging the other senses too. A striking example of the latter is Merleau-
Ponty’s famous essay on Cezanne, in which he claims that the painter tried to
represent objects through the prism of all senses, not just the visual;27 along the
same line, Pierre Francastel on Renoir suggests that “he draws close to the
model, touches, feels it with his eye and hand.”28 The close-up in Petersburg
renders a similar reading experience—one premised on the problematization
of perspectivalized space and on synesthetic bodily representation, including
vision, touch, taste, and smell, which Bely challenges us to feel and know.
In Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, a classic study of
modernity, Bely’s novel acts as a virtual reification of the title, not in its original
Marxist sense (the phrase comes from The Communist Manifesto and refers to so-
cial relations under capitalism), but literally.29 Even Petersburg as a place on
the map is unstable: the prologue’s dot on the map is later transformed into
astral space that exists in the phantasmic “fourth dimension” not indicated—
that is, seen—on maps. And Bely’s experiments with transmogrification and
dissolution of form can be seen as the product of a kind of melting, images of
which actually appear in the novel.

The Pe t er sburg Tex t

Bely’s novel is generally considered the prerevolutionary culmination of the

so-called Petersburg text in Russian literature, which is associated with some
of the most important nineteenth century Russian poetry and prose fiction by
Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and many others. It
is a virtual compendium of canonic Petersburg texts, ranging from Pushkin’s
fantastic narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, which highlights the city’s best-
known monument, and novella The Queen of Spades and Gogol’s sinister Petersburg
Tales to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. All of them are defined by walking,
running, and riding along Petersburg streets as the characters map different
locales of the city. In regard to urban space, the Petersburg text, quite predict-
ably, 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
I nt rod uc t ion 11

takes place only in marginal locales, including the islands, not in classical city
sites.30
Charting a modernist vision of the Petersburg text, Bely represents its self-
reflexive, intertextual essence in relation to the artfully constructed and majes-
tic, yet sinister and dying, city. Bely’s Petersburg certainly corroborates the
Underground Man’s claim about the northern capital: that it is “the most ab-
stract and premeditated city in the whole world;”31 indeed, it is precisely its ra-
tional, planned character that is problematized in the novel. What Bely takes
from his forebears is both the intentional and fantastic, or phantasmagoric,
apocalyptic vision of the imperial city in which statues come to life to haunt its
inhabitants, the devil lights the gas street lamps on Nevsky Prospect, and an im-
poverished young radical kills a predatory old woman. Bely, however, was not
a resident of the capital, which likely contributed to its defamiliarized represen-
tation. The Petersburg poet par excellence of Bely’s generation was Alexander
Blok, his poet-twin, who figures prominently in part 2 of this volume. Signifi-
cantly, Blok was not only a Petersburg resident but also a peripatetic poet who
strolled the city, especially its margins, for hours on end late into the night to
write memorable urban poems.
Vladimir Toporov’s “Petersburg and ‘the Petersburg Text’ in Russian Lit-
erature” (1984) offers the most complete scholarly articulation of the imperial
city as text and its attendant mythology.32 The relationship was originally artic-
ulated by the city’s preservationists at the beginning of the twentieth century,
especially in Nikolay Antsiferov’s The Soul of Petersburg (1922), which emphasizes
the power of genius loci (spirit of place) and the indissoluble bond of the city
and its literary representation—what we would call the discourse of Petersburg.
Besides authoring several important literary guidebooks to the city, Antsiferov
was one of the founders of the excursion movement in the 1920s, the account of
which has recently appeared in Emily Johnson’s How Petersburg Learned to Study
Itself.33 The movement emerged as a response to the spread of capitalism and
the city’s rapid commercial expansion, which gave rise to new architectural
tastes and, in turn, to Petersburg’s preservationist concerns. Katerina Clark has
aptly described them using Georg Lukács’s expression “Romantic Anticapital-
ism,” claiming that Bely may be considered under this rubric too,34 even
though it was precisely the impulse to represent modernity that inspired his
premier modernist experiment in the Russian novel.
The World of Art movement of the turn of the twentieth century and its
journal Mir Iskusstva were at the forefront of these concerns and their attendant
retrospectivism. Its most devoted proponent was the artist Alexander Benois,
who sounded the threat to the neoclassical architecture of Old Petersburg,
12       

whose last historical expression, according to him, was the “empire” style de-
veloped in the reign of Alexander I.35 He called on artists to represent the
beauty of aristocratic Petersburg, not just its menacing and fantastic myth.36
The threat to historical Petersburg, as he and his colleagues perceived it, was
the proliferation of eclectic, decorative architectural styles of the second half of
the nineteenth century, especially of pseudo-Russian orientalism. Most impor-
tantly, they perceived modern bourgeois Petersburg and capitalist expansion as
threatening their historicist vision of the aristocratic imperial capital.

Ci ty G uidebooks—From Above a n d Bel ow

Benois also lamented the lack of good guidebooks to Petersburg in 1904: “A

Russian who wanted to get to know his capital has had to fall back on the
foreign Baedeker. But the Baedeker for Petersburg is not at all as well com-
posed as the classical guidebooks to Germany and Italy by the same publisher.
We still have not had our Naglers, Burckhardts, Passavants, Cavalcaselles—
which Baedeker is able to use so effectively.”37 During the 1910s, the city’s
preservationists Vladimir Kurbatov, Peter Stolpyansky, and Georgy Lukomsky
wrote guidebooks to the imperial capital, emphasizing its neoclassical architec-
ture and the Petersburg myth in Russian literature. Although the purpose of
this volume is not to shed further light on the aristocratic Petersburg that Benois
lamented, part 2, as well as the attendant Web site, can be described as a guide-
book to aspects of the city’s still unexplored material culture and everyday, as
well as artistic, revolutionary, and commercial life.
Yet our approach to the city bears affinity to the recommendations of
Antsiferov and his mentor Ivan M. Grevs, a medievalist and professor of St.
Petersburg University and Bestuzhev Women’s Courses, who developed a
methodology for an excursionist approach to the study of historical urban cen-
ters in Italy. He viewed historical cities as living organisms to which he applied
what he calls an “anatomical” approach, “charting [their] growth, transporta-
tion arteries, and economic cells, first with the help of historic maps and then
through carefully designed excursions.”38 Antsiferov, a student of Grevs, went
on a memorable excursion to Italy in 1912 as a member of his seminar on Dante.
The younger historian would adopt his mentor’s views in his writing about
Petersburg and excursion primers, including the conceptualization of the city as
a “living organism,”39 which was also Bely’s vision. Antsiferov’s city, moreover,
has a soul. Whether its body is diseased, like the nineteenth-century industrial
city that needs to be anatomized in order to be cured, raises a different kind of
I nt rod uc t ion 13

question, one that the physiologists of the natural school had addressed in their
sketches with the idea of introducing new parts of the city into literature and
also of raising the reader’s social consciousness.40 In regard to introducing new
parts of the city, part 2 of this volume may be said to follow in the physiologists’
footsteps.
Returning to Antsiferov, here is how he describes the initial steps of study-
ing cities in The Soul of Petersburg:
Professor I. M. Grevs recommends starting the “conquest” of a city by visiting
some kind of elevated spot. [. . .] in Rome to climb Janiculum Hill or the Gar-
dens of Monte Pincio; view Venice and Florence from the height of their well-
balanced campaniles; Paris—from Montmartre Hill, from the cupola of the ba-
silica of Sacre Coeur. I. M. Grevs appropriately notes that perspectives from a
bird’s-eye view are not very appealing aesthetically, but they offer a great deal
for the study of topography. And really, everything appears flat, all irregular-
ities are erased, before us is a barely outlined bas-relief that approximates a
plan. But the spectator gets the opportunity to see the city framed by surround-
ing nature, and without it the image would not be complete and consequently
would not be perceived as an organic whole. We will feel here the air of place
which the city breathes.41

The genre of city views painted from above was directly linked to car-
tography, which became an independent genre in the seventeenth century;
prints of these paintings were often made by mapmakers. According to Guiliana
Bruno, “the bird’s eye view was a permeable space of encounters between the
map and the landscape [. . .], staged as fabricated spatial observation that
opened the door to narrative space.”42 Antsiferov’s claim regarding Grevs’s
prescribed bird’s-eye view resembles de Certeau’s description of the panoramic
perspective of the city, discovered by medieval and Renaissance painters, as
offering a “voluptuous pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’”43 despite his otherwise
privileging the lived space of the pedestrian, who uncovers urban locales that
have been forgotten. Like other theorists, de Certeau follows Foucault’s lead by
claiming that the panoramic view is an expression of panoptic vision, in the
sense of space as a complex of social relations defined by power and regulation.
Whether Grevs had a sense of the power that later twentieth-century theorists
would assign to panoptic vision, his reference to “conquest” and mapping do
suggest an awareness of the virtual control of space and human geography
from a bird’s-eye vantage point; so does his perception of the totalizing view as
erasing irregularities by making the city below look flat and anonymous,
thereby locating the viewer in a position of power resembling de Certeau’s
“voyeur-god.”44
14       

Grevs’s view of the city from above is also associated with the mastery
of the city’s individuality: in the case of Petersburg, writes Antsiferov, it must
begin from the cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, from where one will recognize
the will—and power—of Peter the Great. Antsiferov’s view evokes The Hunch-
back of Notre Dame, in which Quasimodo views the city from the bell tower of the
cathedral. According to Roland Barthes, it represents Hugo’s perception “that
to the marvelous mitigation of altitude the panoramic vision [of Paris] added an
incomparable power of intellection.” In his famous essay on the Eiffel Tower,
modernity’s site of mastering the bird’s-eye view before aviation, Barthes claims
that the panoramic view represents the will to readability: the viewer tries to
identify the landmarks below from memory, an important aspect of any defi-
nition of place. Moreover, “the tower looks at Paris,” writes Barthes,45 just as
Petersburg ’s stone caryatid, witness of the city’s history and human swarm, looks
at the Russian metropolis from its elevated position; and as the Admiralty
Tower would do if it had “the gift of sight,” notes Petersburg urban historian
Grigory Kaganov;46 or as Vyacheslav Ivanov and Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal’s
Tower, a celebrated elite intelligentsia meeting place, looked at Petersburg
below in the 1900s. The bird’s-eye view of the city in Bely’s novel belongs not
only to the caryatid and The Bronze Horseman—whom Antsiferov endows with an
eagle’s gaze—but also to the narrator and Apollon Apollonovich: riding to work
past important city landmarks, the senator looks at Petersburg from a fantastic
aerial perspective, as if his carriage had taken off into the sky as in the trick film
that Bely describes in “The City;” this perspective may also stem from the fasci-
nation, shared by Bely with his contemporaries, with astral flight, and, accord-
ing to John Bowlt, inspired by the new technological developments in aviation.47
Predictably, Antsiferov names as the capital’s genius loci Falconet’s Bronze
Horseman, who overlooks the city from his pedestal on the Neva embankment
and at whose commanding presence, Antsiferov proposes, the pedestrian gazes
from below on a windy autumn evening. Like Bely, Antsiferov describes The
Bronze Horseman as phantasmagoric: as “fire turned into copper with sharply
defined and powerful shapes” that “produce the anxious question: what next?
[. . .] Victory or rupture and ruin?”48 Bely asked the very same question several
years earlier. In keeping with the apocalyptic figuration of Peter’s city in the
Petersburg text and the novel’s explosive, metamorphic imagery, the fiery
equestrian statue, abandoning its pedestal on Senate Square, as in Pushkin’s
Bronze Horseman, pursues the troubled young anarchist, Alexander Dudkin, and
in the end flows “into his veins in metals.” The metamorphosis of the statue and
momentary fusion of the Bronze Horseman and young revolutionary reveal
what Antsiferov, writing after the revolution, would call Petersburg’s tragic
I nt rod uc t ion 15

imperialism, which, he seems to imply, contained the seeds of its own destruc-
tion from the beginning: this conflicted imperialism led to revolution and the
city’s demise, both lamented and aestheticized by Antsiferov.49
The Bronze Horseman, located on a huge rock on Senate Square, commands
a view of the city across the Neva River, but the statue is also the object of the
street-level gaze from below, not only of a distant view from across the river. In
Bely’s novel the Horseman inhabits the view at ground level after abandoning
his pedestal and galloping through the city and up the stairs to Dudkin’s garret.
There the statue becomes the object of a surreal close-up as it melts into the
young anarchist’s veins, just as Dudkin melted into the oozing crowd on Nevsky
earlier. The Horseman’s fusion with his revolutionary “son” makes Peter un-
readable in de Certeau’s terms, that is, after he leaves his panoptic position on
the Thunder Stone, or in the terms of the opening sentence of Edgar Allan Poe’s
famed “The Man of the Crowd”: “It was well said of a certain German book
that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read.”50 Considered
from the perspective of modernist poetics, however, the fusion serves as a sur-
real performance that challenges Bely’s readers to read it in the terms of the new
aesthetics and thereby overcome the fusion’s illegibility, suggesting that illegibil-
ity is in the eye of the unpracticed reader as beholder. The same can be said of
Bely’s “illegible” close-ups of the metropolis, which become readable if we pen-
etrate the modernist images that represent the novel’s urban phantasmagoria.
Following Grevs’s recommendation that a city excursion must be con-
nected to the city’s literary achievements, Antsiferov locates Petersburg’s other
genius loci in Russian literature, claiming that Pushkin created the image of the
imperial city as much as did Peter. As a result, most of The Soul of Petersburg is
devoted to the Petersburg text in Russian literature, with the examination of
Bely’s novel taking up more pages than any other single work. In this regard
too, the referencing of the novel in our essays devoted to the city follows Antsi-
ferov’s approach. Like the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov before him—who
suggested the title Petersburg to Bely—Antsiferov claims that its hero is the city
itself, which according to him becomes a “supra-personal being,” one that is
represented from a plurality of perspectives: historical, futurist, climatic, color-
ist, metamorphic, fantastic, demonic, mythical. And despite the novel’s shad-
owy spectral aspect, he considers it to be an excellent guidebook to the city: “it
is easy to lead excursions based on Petersburg,” writes Antsiferov, which accord-
ing to him also offers a “bird’s-eye view” of the city as a whole.51 As a profes-
sional guide to his beloved city in the early Soviet period, he should know
whether the novel worked as guidebook. Yet the prominent scholar of Petersburg
Leonid Dolgopolov would in all likelihood have disagreed with Antsiferov’s
16       

assertion: instead of topographic verisimilitude, Dolgopolov emphasized the

novel’s inexactitudes, suggesting that Bely was concerned not with the real but
with an imaginary Petersburg.52

Le ss Fa milia r Ang l es

Part 2 of “Petersburg”/Petersburg focuses on the lesser known history and geogra-

phy of the imperial metropolis on the eve of and right after the Bolshevik revo-
lution. While its timeline is different, it resembles in this regard the approach of
Julie Buckler’s Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape by examining the
“middle ground” of the city’s life.53 Like Buckler, part 2 retrieves new, often
marginal, names, places, and objects from the city’s memory that have not
been accorded magical power before, introducing new constellations of urban
meaning to exist side by side with the familiar magical names and locales asso-
ciated with the Petersburg text. To name a few that have languished in plain
view: the city margins, such as the Karpovka River or city slaughterhouse on
Zabalkansky Prospect; material objects, such as the electrical tram, bomb, and
Singer sewing machine; architectural sites, such as a turn-of-the-century apart-
ment house, office building, and bridge. Their subjection to historical analysis
reveals the underlying core of our project.
In this regard our volume resembles contemporary studies in cultural geog-
raphy, which seek new geographic places and objects to explore and which
emphasize cultural questions located at the intersection of structuralism’s binary
oppositions, such as high/low, above/below, or center/periphery. Soja calls
such an approach “thirding-as-Othering”—his response “to all binarisms, to
any attempt to confine thought and political action to only two alternatives. [. . .]
In this critical thirding, the original binary choice is not dismissed entirely but
is subjected to a creative process of restructuring that draws selectively from the
two opposite categories to open a new alternative.”54 Without claiming a post-
modern agenda or that of hyperreality, as does Soja, this volume explores
“thirdspace”—for instance, as located between the standard spatial opposites
of the static panorama and mobile street view of the city; the latter is defined in
the terms of peripatetic movement and a participatory perspective. Rather
than figure thirdspace as postmodern, we prefer to emphasize how it is already
present in and emerges from the representational practices of modernism itself,
because modernism also brought opposites together as it inflected them. The
most palpable instance of this was film, the newest art form of modernity,
meshing panoramic and close-up views. Perhaps the difference between them
I nt rod uc t ion 17

lies in the theoretical practices and agendas of postmodernism that have chosen
to promote the principle of thirdspace to methodological mainstay.
Grigory Kaganov shows that the collapse of the panoramic and street-level
views into one characterized some graphic figurations of Petersburg already in
the second half of the eighteenth century, even though the standard perspective
was to deploy only one of them. He calls the view from above “a gaze from out-
side” (vzgliad izvne); the second view he calls “inside gaze,” suggesting affect and
a more immediate, intimate engagement with that which had caught the eye
of a pedestrian closer up and was invisible from a distance. Appearing only at
the end of the eighteenth century according to Kaganov, the latter prefigured
the romantic and subsequent realistic sensibilities focusing, as they would in the
nineteenth century, on human experience.55 The synthesis of the two perspec-
tives in one image opened up “the inner duality of Petersburg space,”56 reveal-
ing, so to speak, the kind of spatial uncertainty, instability, and affect that would
come to characterize modernism and the modernist exemplars of the Peters-
burg text.

Par t One: Petersb urg , t he Novel

Fragmentation and disjuncture are the defining representational principles of

Petersburg: 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 being on the move, moving relentlessly toward the explosion of
the ticking bomb intended for the high-ranking government bureaucrat. Yet
that movement is retarded by the spatialization of narrative, which creates the
sense that the novel takes place over a much longer period of time than it does.
With the Russo-Japanese war and 1905 Revolution as backdrop, the peripa-
tetic bomb—symbol of political disruption and a sinister material object pro-
ducing sensory shock—ticks, traverses real and imaginary space, and causes
novelistic peripety; it is swallowed, swelling in the body; intended for the father,
it explodes in the mind of the son, as he imagines his father’s body splattered on
the wall; and finally does explode, bringing the plot to an end. It motivates
some of the peripatetic movement, back and forth, between close-ups and
more distant views, as well as the spatialization of time.
If the bomb is the material object that generates Petersburg’s fragmented nar-
rative, its master trope is “cerebral play” (mozgovaia igra) that engenders the nov-
elistic metropolis and its inhabitants. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, “Petersburg
is based on what Bely calls ‘the biology of shadows’ and ‘the cerebral game.’
18       

With Bely the city and the brain are in topological contact; [. . .] a continuum
is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of
society, and meteorological states of the world.”57 Cerebral play engenders,
as I propose in the chapter “Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance,” a paranoid
narrative of surveillance to which everyone in the novel contributes, including
the narrator. It inscribes a panoptic approach to the city and a regulatory,
policing vision whose object is the terrorist conspiracy and whose purpose—
though unsuccessful—is the reconstitution of order in a city under the sway of
modernity’s sinister political forces.
Yet “cerebral play,” whose prime mover is the shadowy city, is frequently
characterized as “idle,” an epithet typically applied to the flâneur, whose idle-
ness allows him to become a spectator in the city. It is the agent of daydream-
ing and stream of consciousness. In this function it lodges in the unshaped gray
matter of the characters’ troubled minds and fuses mind and city. Such fusion
offers another form of cohesion, one that is irrational and unsettling to the
characters and readers alike. As the agent of the novel’s narrative, cerebral play
can be said to be hypertextual: it simultaneously informs narrative surveillance,
yet blurs all distinctions—between the real and imagined, physical and mental,
body and space that the body occupies. One way to describe cerebral play’s
function is to say that it is synthetic. In this regard it has the opposite effect from
the bomb whose explosion produces spatial and temporal fragments. More-
over, cerebral play infects the reader, who is staged as virtual detective and who
pieces the narrative fragments together to make the text readable.
These menacing forces and dark mysteries inform the novel’s affect, which
I explore in “Poetics of Disgust.” The essay focuses on the representation of the
body as disgusting to the eye, touch, and taste—dissolving into bodily fluids,
excrement, and a corpse—and as edible—the site of shocking cannibalistic de-
sire. The body in Petersburg is Dionysian: it is torn to pieces or shown morphing
into unformed shapes that threaten the Apollonian order of the city and its
inhabitants and of moral and aesthetic norms. The body is grotesquely and
mutably baroque, as is, I contend, the novel itself. The folding of space, move-
ment, and time informs the novel’s will to baroque-like metamorphosis, typify-
ing Bely’s transformational, often labyrinthine poetics.58
Characterized by movement toward and away from a viscerally, mentally,
or morally aversive experience, the disgust response reinforces Petersburg ’s spa-
tial poetics, which define its motional aspect. It resembles in this regard the rep-
resentation of the city as movement between close-up and distanced perspec-
tive. What seems to interest Bely in relation to city space as well as to the affect
of the city’s inhabitants is the relationship between the two perspectives and the
I nt rod uc t ion 19

ready shifts in point of view that emerge as a result of their interplay. The nar-
rator offers an everyday metaliterary example of what he means by the spatial
aspect of aversive emotion by describing what we do when stepping on a
swarming anthill, one of the novel’s key self-reflexive “unreadable” images: we
instinctively jump aside in shock and in disgust as we push away the experience.
Critics so far have not considered the affective impact of the novel’s im-
agery and the aversive emotions that they engender in aesthetic and moral
terms. The historicizing and narrativizing of emotions is a new field of critical
inquiry; moreover, the reader’s emotional engagement with a literary text has
been associated more readily with realistic fiction than with modernist writing.
Instead of suggesting emotional identification, however, I argue that Petersburg
challenges the reader’s emotional, moral, and aesthetic tolerance, gauging if
and when the reader as spectator averts her mental gaze from the novel’s shock-
ingly transgressive images. The test and attendant gesture of disgust premised
on a close-up view and subsequent recoil can also be said to characterize the
experience of modernist art, whose transgressiveness still challenges us today.
The modernist high point of the Petersburg text, Bely’s novel can be called
a modernist Gesamtkunstwerk that offers a synthesis of writing, poetic and pro-
saic, and the musical and visual arts. Petersburg’s structure has been described as
musical, composed of repeated sounds, images, and whole passages of leitmo-
tifs and of rhythmically orchestrated passages that deploy poetic meter, all of
which have been widely examined in Bely scholarship. Robert Alter describes
Petersburg as “an acutely visual novel,” yet its visual poetics, despite Nikolay
Berdyaev’s brilliant reading of them in 1916, remain virtually unstudied.59
Comparing Bely to Picasso, Berdyaev calls him a cubist and describes the novel
in terms of

the 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. The firmness, the limitedness, the crystallization of our
fleshly world is dissolved. 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.60

Instead of examining the novel’s cubist imagery noted by Berdyaev, “An-

drey Bely, Wassily Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics” explores Petersburg
in relation to expressionist aesthetics—as a counterpart to Kandinsky’s experi-
ments in painting during the Munich period, which introduced a new visual lan-
guage of expressive lines and abstract shapes to render the time’s apocalyptic
20       

anxieties. The essay also argues that Bely’s theoretical writing on art and
anthroposophic experience can be aligned with Kandinsky’s vision, especially
in the influential essay On the Spiritual in Art.
Bely’s dematerialization of the word and perspectival shifts of the phan-
tasmagoric city and its inhabitants that the reader must visualize and make
intelligible are the focus of the chapter. In this regard his later comment about
Pilnyak’s writing is telling. Bely told Shklovsky that it had the effect of a paint-
ing on him because he did not know how to view it—from a distance or close
up, finding his readerly bearings only gradually.61 Bely’s response to Pilnyak’s
prose (which in fact was directly influenced by Bely’s writing) and its unsettling
impact resembles my reading of Petersburg and its effect on the reader.
One of the most striking perspectival shifts in the novel is the visual repre-
sentation of Nevsky Prospect close up and at street level, then from a great dis-
tance and back to a closer, but still panoramic, view, which I compare to three
city paintings by Kandinsky. Each of the three urban perspectives in Petersburg
inscribes our eye movement, as in a painting, from here to there, there, and
there, and then back. The view of the city from a distance and inscription of the
reader’s mental eye movement from here to there, not uncommon in the novel,
reinforce the spatialization of the narrative.
My three essays, then, focus on the displacements, or shifts, of urban
space and its phantasmagoria as the novel’s characters negotiate the city at the
nexus of external and inner, or fantastic, psychic space, which evokes Simmel’s
vision of the modern metropolis. Even the mansion in which Apollon Apollono-
vich and his son live shifts its fashionable location on the Neva River. So we
can conclude that what Bely explores are perspectival shifts of the phantasma-
goric city and its residents that he represents in modernist terms—cubist and
expressionist—and which the reader must visualize and make intelligible. My
three essays are exercises in close reading that uncover the thickly layered
meanings of Petersburg ’s multistoried metaphors that spatialize narrative. In
hypertextual terms such metaphors may be described as superimposed trans-
parencies that contribute to one of the novel’s key strategies—of simultaneity,
which, as Joseph Frank suggested in his seminal essay in 1945, spatializes narra-
tive, associating it with modernism.62
These essays are not intended polemically or conclusively, for as Maguire
and Malmstad put it twenty years ago, “readings of Bely must honor his addic-
tion to plurality and his concern with dynamism, the notion of continuous cre-
ation. [. . .] He intended that his readers should fend for themselves among a
proliferation of meanings. Any reading must take account of the full range of
contrasting, even contradictory elements in Petersburg.”63
I nt rod uc t ion 21

Par t Two: Pet e r sburg, t he C i t y

Part 2 of “Petersburg”/Petersburg may be seen as a new historicist examination of

the city: its architecture, material culture, literary, political, and quotidian life,
and its economy of production and consumption. It does this from the theoreti-
cal and historical perspectives described earlier, exploring the ways urban space,
material objects, and navigation of the city undergird the production of nar-
rative. The city types that have inspired our approach are those of Benjamin’s
collector, ragpicker, and Baudelairian flâneur, who seeks stimulation in crowds
even though his primary inclination is to observe the city from a distance. Ben-
jamin writes that “Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as
into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock,
he calls this man ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.’”64 It is this kaleido-
scopic view of the city that we have adopted in our virtual urban perambulations
of Petersburg. The Parisian ragpicker, with whom Benjamin identifies, is “a
man who has to gather the day’s refuse in the capital city. Everything that the big
city threw away, everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed
under foot, he catalogues and collects.”65 Like the ragpicker, we retrieve, collect,
and historicize the marginal “historical refuse” and thereby contribute new
urban entries to the Petersburg encyclopedia. The indisputable pleasure of
collecting, which is often magical because of its serendipitous, chance aspect,
characterizes the affect of the essays in part 2 and of the related Web site.
They range from more traveled aspects of Petersburg to those that have not
yet been traversed by scholarship, and in all instances they explore overlooked
aspects of the Russian imperial capital. “How Terrorists Learned to Map: Plot-
ting in Petersburg and Boris Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse,”
by Alexis Peri and Christine Evans, is devoted to one of the most famous assas-
sinations of the late imperial period. But instead of its political consequences,
the essay examines the terrorist plot through the writings of Boris Savinkov,
one of the masterminds of the plot, and of Bely, emphasizing especially their
representations of the city. It shows that minister of the interior Vyacheslav von
Plehve’s assassination was emblematic of the acute sense of crisis that accom-
panied Petersburg’s transformation into a modern metropolis characterized by
sharp contradictions, impenetrability, and fragmentation—all of which raised
new questions and opportunities for terrorists and writers alike.
Alexander Blok, the volume’s other literary hero, is the main subject of two,
if not three (see Barskova’s essay below), chapters. “The Enchanted Masque-
rade: Alexander Blok’s The Puppet Show from the Stage to the Streets,” by
Cameron Wiggins, radiates out from the premiere of the play in 1906 at the
22       

Vera Komissarzhevskaya Theater to the stage set that is Petersburg—which is

examined as the backdrop of the playwright’s and actors’ relationships, mas-
querade balls, and late-night strolls through the city, along with its place in
Blok’s poetry. Marking the mythologized end of St. Petersburg, “The Voices of
Silence: The Death and Funeral of Alexander Blok,” by Victoria Smolkin-
Rothrock, closes part 2. The essay reconstructs the events through the reminis-
cences of contemporaries and examines their viewing of his corpse in the inti-
mate setting of the family apartment and their participation in the public funeral
procession through the city and burial at Smolensk Cemetery in 1921. Smolkin
argues that the symbolic motif of silence associated with the death of Peters-
burg’s iconic poet, and more broadly with the symbolic death of the city itself,
issued from the remarkable fact that during the funeral “no one spoke at the
grave.”
Ulla Hakanen’s “Panoramas from Above and the Street from Below: The
Petersburg of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin” focuses on the different
ways these two major figures of Russian modernism perceived and engaged
with the urban spaces of Petersburg, including Ivanov’s famed Tower. It argues
that one of the essential differences between their aesthetics and experiences of
the self has to do with the ways they used the city to literally frame themselves—
Ivanov, from the stable panoramic vantage point of his fifth-floor apartment,
and Kuzmin, from multiple, ever changing, mostly street-level perspectives.
Some of the city chapters concentrate more specifically on the city’s impor-
tant landmarks. Lucas Stratton’s “The Button and the Barricade: Bridges in
Paris and Petersburg” tells the story of the Trinity Bridge over the Neva River
(1903) and its affiliation with the older Alexander III Bridge in Paris as a symbol
of Russian-French unity and imperial power. The essay sheds light on the
bridge as the will to connection and on its role as a spatial and textual meta-
phor of narrative mapped onto the city landscape. My essay “28 Nevsky Pros-
pect: The Sewing Machine, the Seamstress, and Narrative” focuses on the
House of Singer, the headquarters of the American sewing machine company
in Russia, as a site of modern commercial life. It explores the figure of the
seamstress as an agent of narrative in poetry and prose fiction, and it examines
the company’s narrative strategies that informed Singer’s advertisement of the
sewing machine to family households in Russia.
Moving to the city outskirts, Mieka Erley investigates the city slaughter-
house on Obvodny Canal. In “Meat in Russia’s Modernist Imagination,”
Erley assembles literary works, period travel guides, trade documents, and
films to consider the industrialization of animal slaughter, representations of
the human body, and modernist art movements in early twentieth-century
I nt rod uc t ion 23

Russia. She demonstrates that modernist artistic production was centrally

concerned with the dismemberment, fragmentation, and dislocation of the
body through the trope of slaughter.
Although all the city chapters inscribe movement through the city, two do
this more directly. Polina Barskova’s “The Fluid Margins: Flâneurs of the Kar-
povka River” reconstructs the experience of walking alongside the languid flow
of the river, also located on the city outskirts. Barskova argues that at the turn
of the twentieth century a new sense of urban intimacy emerged far from the
city center, in the socially, economically, and architecturally mixed locale
through which the river flows. She does this by focusing on Karpovka’s artist-
flâneurs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially Blok, and their lit-
erary and graphic representations of the city that blur the boundaries of time
and space.
Alyson Tapp’s “‘The Streetcar Prattle of Life’: Reading and Riding St.
Petersburg’s Trams,” which opens part 2, follows the coming of the electric
streetcar to Petersburg’s streets in 1907 and its entry into the literary imagina-
tion in the decades that follow. Pausing on some of the texts and city locations
associated with the tram, the chapter acquaints the reader with the “city as
text”—where the experience of movement is at once that of narrative and that
of a most ordinary practice of everyday urban life. It shows that the tram can
be made the bearer of a particular literary-historical narrative: Petersburg’s
cultural experience of the crisis in novel form.
The essays in part 2 offer what can be described as hypertextual fragments
of St. Petersburg history. They examine both actual events and sites and reflect
our approach to the city as existing at the intersection of time and space, with a
particular emphasis on the latter. Although the timeline of the volume is 1900–
1921, the year of Blok’s death, some of the essays transgress the temporal bound-
aries as they move back and forward in time. The essays are linked to the Web
site Mapping Petersburg, which consists of itineraries through the late imperial cap-
ital. While the book and Web site exist independently of each other, together
they represent what can be called a Gesamtwerk—a synthetic study of novelistic,
urban, and hypertextual narratives that offers an early twenty-first-century
Petersburg text whose origin lies in the age of modernity and modernism.


1. Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 2.
2. See the thematic cluster on the Leningrad Blockade in Slavic Review 69, no. 2
(2010), edited by Polina Barskova, who is one of the authors in Part 2 of this volume.
24       

3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 91.
4. N. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga (Leningrad: Leningradskii komitet literatorov.
Agentstvo Lira, 1990), 27.
5. For a history of the different editions and publication history of Petersburg, see
L. K. Dolgopolov, “Osnovnye redaktsii romana,” in Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K.
Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 569–83.
6. B. Pilnyak, B. Pasternak, and G. Sannikov, “Andrey Bely. Nekrolog,” in Andrey
Bely: Pro et Contra, ed. A. V. Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Russkii Khristianskii gumanitarnyi
institut, 2004), 851.
7. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), 57.
8. The first English translation, titled St. Petersburg, is by John Cournos (New York:
Grove Press, 1959), which took many liberties with the original. There are two English
translations of the Sirin edition of the novel, one by David McDuff (Harmondsworth:
Grove Press, 1995), and one by John Elsworth (London: Pushkin Press, 2009).
9. The most extensive study of Petersburg is by the Russian scholar Leonid Dolgopo-
lov (Andrey Bely i ego roman “Peterburg” [Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988]). The most re-
cent study is by Timothy Langen, The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely’s “Peters-
burg” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005). See also Vladmir Alexandrov,
Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
10. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (Springfield, MA: Merriam-
Webster, 2003). The term “peripatetic” refers to the disciples and philosophy of Aris-
totle and reflects his practice of walking about the Lyceum in Athens while teaching. On
peripatetics in Petersburg see Peter Barta, Bely, Joyce, and Döblin: Peripatetics in the City Novel
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996).
11. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social
Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 325.
12. Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur, 3rd ed. (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1923), 196,
quoted in David Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (London:
Routledge, 1992), 66.
13. See Andrey Bely’s 1912 essay “Circular Movement,” in which he offers a list of
the most influential philosophers in his intellectual development that includes Simmel
(“Krugovoe dvizhenie,” Trudy i dni 4–5 [1912]: 67–68). For an examination of Bely’s
essay in relation to Petersburg, see Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, “Peters-
burg,” in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. John Malmstad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1987), 96–144. Apparently, between 1893 and 1926 Simmel was translated
into Russian more than into English (Frisby, Simmel and Since, 78), although it may very
well be that Simmel’s essay on the metropolis was translated into Russian only very re-
cently (in the contemporary cultural and philosophical journal Logos 3–4 [2002]). Sim-
mel and Bely were both admirers of the leading Neo-Kantian Freiburg philosopher
Heinrich Rickert, whose correspondence with Simmel represents an important philo-
sophical dialogue of the time. Bely’s key essay Emblematics of Meaning (1909) was influ-
enced by Rickert’s theory of knowledge and its exploration of the role of will and value in
the definition of the truth. The essay also refers to Simmel: his view that the heteronomy
of will is already present in the definition of practical reason as will (Andrey Bely, Em-
blematika smysla in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, ed. A.L. Kazin [ Moscow: Iskusstvo,
I nt rod uc t ion 25

1994], 1:112). Simmel and Bely appeared in the Russian edition of Logos, edited by S. I.
Gessen, Emil Medtner, and F. A. Stepun and published by Medtner’s Musaget in 1910.
Simmel’s essay was titled “K voprosu o metafizike smerti” (“Zur Metaphysik des
Todes”) and Bely’s, “Mysl’ i iazyk” (“Thought and Language,” devoted to A. A. Poteb-
nya and his key work, Thought and Language, 1862). Many years later in 1934, Bely would
devote several pages to the enthusiasm of Medtner (one of Bely’s mentors) for Simmel’s
writing (Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov [ Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia litera-
tura, 1990], 306, 307, 326, 342). Among other prominent Russians at the turn of the cen-
tury, Simmel influenced Peter B. Struve. The famous Russian philosopher Sergey
Frank translated Simmel’s essay on Kant and Goethe, which appeared in Struve’s Russ-
kaia mysl’ in1908 and which Bely clearly read.
14. http://petersburg.berkeley.edu/index.html. On Mapping Petersburg see “Con-
cluding Remarks” in this volume.
15. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Exposé [1939],”
in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 26.
16. Andrey Bely, “Gorod,” Arabeski, in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, ed. A. L.
Kazin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 2:324.
17. See, e.g., Bely’s 1907 and 1908 essays “Teatr i sovremennaia drama” and “Pesn’
zhizni” in Arabeski. A specific instance of Bely’s and Benjamin’s similar discussion of the
bourgeois city is their view of comfort as antithetical to desirable social values.
18. Bely, “Gorod,” 322.
19. Yury Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger
(London: Routledge, 1994), 120. See Bely, “Gorod,” 323.
20. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22.
21. See especially Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1973), which does not figure in
this volume, even though many of us discuss the emotional experience of lived space,
but without referencing Lefebvre’s concept of “lived space,” because his ideological
approach to the question is different from ours.
22. Edward Soja, “History: Geography: Modernity,” in The Cultural Studies Reader,
ed. Simon During, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 115.
23. V. B. Shklovsky, Khod konia in Gamburgskii schet: Stat’i—vospominaniia. Esse, ed.
A. I. Galushkin and A. P. Chudakov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 148. Shklovsky
discusses Bely’s “swarm” extensively in regard to his next novel, Kotik Letaev, in “Andrey
Bely,” Gamburgskii schet, in Gamburgskii schet, 227–31. Here is Bely’s disquisition on
swarming in Kotik Letaev: “My first moments are—swarms; and ‘a swarm, a swarm—
everything swarms’ is my first philosophy; I was swarming in swarms; I described
circles—afterwards: [. . .] the circle and the sphere are the first shapes: coswarmings in
a swarm” (Andrey Bely, Kotik Letaev, trans. Gerald Janecek [Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis,
1971], 45).
24. E. W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imaginary Spaces
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 235.
25. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 92.
26. This is only partly true: the most important deviation in this regard is the shift-
ing city locations of the Ableukhov mansion.
26       

27. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert
L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964),
9–25.
28. Pierre Francastel, “The Destruction of a Plastic Space,” in Art History: An Anthol-
ogy of Modern Criticism, ed. Wylie Sypher (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 394, quoted
in Marin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 155n13.
29. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Lon-
don: Verso, 1983). Note that Sofia Petrovna in Petersburg is reading The Communist Mani-
festo. It is meant ironically because by then Bely had lost his enthusiasm for revolution
and for Marx.
30. There is one panoramic view of the city, seen through the eyes of Raskolnikov
as he crosses Nikolaevsky Bridge from Vasilievsky Island. It references only the cupola
of St. Isaac’s, without naming it, and pointedly does not refer to The Bronze Horseman—
the classical site in that vista.
31. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Michael R. Katz (New York:
Norton, 1989), 5.
32. See V. N. Toporov, “Peterburg i Peterburgskij tekst: mir, iazyk, prednaz-
nachenie,” in Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2003). See also
Yuri Lotman, “Simvolika Peterburga i problemy semiotiki goroda,” Trudy po znakovym
sistemam 18 (1984): 30–45. Toporov’s essay was first published in the same issue of the
journal.
33. Emily Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Krae-
vedenie (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). For a discussion of
Antsiferov, see A. M. Konechny, “N. P. Antsiferov—issledovatel’ Peterburga,” in Peter-
burg i guberniia: Istoriko-etnograficheskie issledovaniia, ed. N. V. Yukhneva (Leningrad: Nauka,
1989), 154–61; and A. M. Konechny and K. A. Kumpan, “Peterburg v zhizni i trudakh
N. P. Antsiferova,” in N. P. Antsiferov, Nepostizhimyi gorod (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat,
1991).
34. Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1995), 16. See also pp. 57–73.
35. Benois was affiliated with the Society of Friends of Old Petersburg and was the
first director of the Museum of Old Petersburg established in 1907. For a discussion of
the preservationist movement, see Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned. Benois famously
contributed to the Petersburg text by illustrating The Bronze Horseman in 1904.
36. A. Benua, “Zhivopisnyi Peterburg,” Mir iskusstva 1 (1902): 3.
37. Review of D. D. Ivanov, Ob’iasnitel’nyi putevoditel’ po khudozhestvennym sobraniiam
Peterburga, Mir iskusstva 6 (1904): 126–27. Quoted in Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned,
58. Bely makes ironic reference to the Baedeker guidebook of Petersburg in his novel
some ten years later; in an allusion to the myth of Petersburg as a dying city, one of its
shadowy characters claims that Karl Baedeker misleads the visitor by keeping mum
about the “fact” that the capital city belongs to the world of the spirits, not of the living.
38. Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned, 121. Bely describes the city as the earth’s
brain and a living organism that forms a steel web around the individual (“Gorod,” 324).
39. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga, 9.
40. See especially the collection A Physiology of Petersburg (1845), which could be seen
as a guidebook to previously unseen parts of the city.
I nt ro d uc t io n 27

41. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga, 16.

42. Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London:
Verso, 2002), 175–77.
43. De Certeau, Practice, 92.
44. Another source of our approach to the study of the late imperial city are the
excursions around Petersburg for the city’s working class that Grevs pioneered after the
revolution, having developed them first at the progressive Tenishev School in Peters-
burg. Johnson writes that “excursionism began as a campaign for pedagogical reform”
at the beginning of the twentieth century, evidenced by the curriculum of the Tenishev
School, which was established in 1898 (How St. Petersburg Learned, 98). Among its cele-
brated students were Osip Mandelshtam and Vladimir Nabokov, who famously con-
tributed to the Petersburg text. A pioneer of the late nineteenth-century “real” school
movement, which emphasized learning in situ, the school encouraged its teachers to
take their students on field trips to real-life locations with the purpose of bringing the
pedagogical curriculum to life. According to Johnson, there was a virtual pedagogical
boom in school excursions by 1914.
45. Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural
Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 175–76.
46. Grigory Kaganov, Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts, trans.
Sidney Monas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 94.
47. John Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg 1900–1920: Art, Life and Culture of the Silver Age
(New York: Vendome Press, 2008), 120–27. Cf. cosmic flight in Bely’s novel, or his com-
parison of spiritual flight to that of Count Zeppelin in “Teatr i sovremennaia drama”
(Arabeski, 2:49). Also words fly in Bely’s writing. The narrator in Kotik Letaev claims that
“imagining is knowing how to fly on words” (Bely, Kotik Letaev, 82).
48. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga, 19.
49. Vladislav Khodasevich writing about Petersburg of the early 1920s would say
that “there are people who become more beautiful in the coffin: so it was apparently
with Pushkin. Undoubtedly, so it was with Petersburg” (Khodasevich, “Disk,” in Sobra-
nie sochinenii v 4-t., vol. 4, Nekropol’. Vospominanii. Pis’ma [ Moscow: Soglasie, 1997], 273.)
50. “The Man of the Crowd,” in The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R.
Thompson (New York: Norton, 2004), 232. Since the word “book” in German (das Buch)
is of neuter gender, the correct pronominal form would be es (not er, as Poe has it) and
the correct verb form is lässt. The Russian translation of the 1840 story appeared in Bib-
lioteka dlia chteniia (Library for Reading) as “Chelovek tolpy” in 1857; the French transla-
tion was by Baudelaire.
51. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga, 177–78. Regarding Ivanov’s role in naming the
novel, see L. K. Dolgopolov, “Tvorcheskaia istoriia i istoriko-literaturnoe znachenie ro-
mana A. Belogo ‘Peterburg’,” in Andrey Bely, Peterburg, 556–57. Bely’s contemporary,
the Georgian poet and prose writer Grigory (Grigol) Robakidze, also wrote, in 1918,
that “the real hero of the novel is Petersburg itself (this alone is something exceptional in
world literature)” (Robakidze, “Andrey Bely,” in Andrey Bely, 466).
52. L. K. Dolgopolov, “Roman A. Belogo ‘Peterburg’” in Andrey Bely, Peterburg,
604–17. We can certainly identify Dudkin’s itinerary from his garret room on Vasiliev-
sky Island across Nikolaevsky Bridge over the Neva River on the map. We see him next
at the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Bolshaya Morskaya Street, where his eyes meet
those of Senator Ableukhov riding to work in his carriage. Apollon Apollonovich’s drive
28       

from his house on the English Embankment is described in detail: he passes St. Isaac’s
Cathedral, the equestrian statue of Nicholas I behind it, turning on Morskaya and from
there on to Nevsky. After that his itinerary is unclear—the location of the government
building where he works is not identified. As to Dudkin, Dolgopolov writes that he had
two options of reaching the corner of Nevsky: along Neva’s embankment and past the
Admiralty Building or along the same path taken by the senator. I would choose the
latter since the narrator tells us that Dudkin was following him (Bely, Petersburg, 36).
From the corner on Nevsky, he goes to a little restaurant on Millionnaya Street, which
is a continuation of the Bolshaya Morskaya on the other side of Nevsky. From there his
path becomes unclear, because the Ableukhov house to which Dudkin delivers the
bomb has shifted to the Gagarin embankment, on the other side of the Winter Palace.
The Maguire and Malmstad translation of Petersburg has a useful map of those parts of
the city where the action of the novel takes place.
53. Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005), 5–8.
54. Soja, Thirdspace, 5. Soja uses the term “thirdspace” to refer to changing ways of
thinking about space; the term and concept have been influenced by the writing of
Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space, first published in France in 1974) and Foucault, to
a lesser extent by Homi Bhaba.
55. Kaganov, Images of Space, 29–46.
56. Ibid., 49.
57. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 302.
58. For a discussion of the baroque in terms of the folding of space, movement, and
time, see Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Deleuze considers folding, starting with the
fold of fabric, a definitive aspect of the baroque.
59. Alter, Imagined Cities, 97.
60. Nikolay Berdyaev, “Astral’nyi roman (Razmyshleniia po povodu romana
A. Belogo ‘Peterburg’),” in Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii, Sobranie sochinenii 3 (Paris:
YMCA-Press, 1989), 432–33. The first version of Berdyaev’s essay titled “Pikasso” had
already appeared in 1914. The comparison of Bely’s style to Picasso’s cubist practice was
developed more extensively by G. Tanin (pseud. of E. Epshteyn) a few months later. For
a discussion of the Tanin essay, see A. V. Lavrov, “‘Peterburg’ Andreia Belogo glazami
bankovskogo sluzhashchego,” in Andrey Bely: Razyskaniia i etiudy (Moscow: Novoe litera-
turnoe obozrenie, 2007), 173–77.
61. Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet, 264.
62. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Widening Gyre: Crisis
and Mastery in Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 3–62.
63. Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 144.
64. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 177.
65. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans.
Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), 79.
    

Petersburg,
the Novel
 1
Backs, Suddenlys,
and Surveillance
    

The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the universe: it is impossible
to speak about it. It is the part of man that he knows nothing of; like an outlying
province forgotten by an emperor. It is a common saying that anything may
happen behind our backs: transcendentally considered the thing has an eerie
truth about it. . . . But this mystery of the human back has again its other side in
the strange impression produced on those behind.1

These are the words of the English detective writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton
describing his fascination with the unknown figured as space behind our backs
and its impact on those who happen to be located there. The observation was
inspired by the Victorian artist G. F. Watts’s paintings of the human figure
from behind. In Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a metaphysical
detective novel about bomb-throwing anarchists, police agents, and detectives,
Syme—the man who becomes Thursday—remembers seeing Sunday, the
godlike master conspirator, for the first time from his sinister back:
When I first saw Sunday, [. . .] I only saw his back; and when I saw his back, I
knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck and shoulders were brutal,
like those of some apish god. [. . .] When I see the horrible back, I am sure the
noble face is but a mask. [. . .] I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the
blind, blank back of his head was his face—an awful, eyeless face staring at me!
And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running
backwards, and dancing as he ran.

31
32       

Syme concludes in his disquisition on the back that we know the world only
from this perspective: “That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a
cloud, but the back of a cloud” and so on. “We see everything from behind,”
claims Syme, “and it looks brutal,” but if only we could locate the front of the
world it will appear radiant to us.2
What makes Chesterton’s comments about the back and his representation
of Sunday noteworthy for us is that Bely’s Petersburg, written a few years later,
also features the back as its most prominent body part, equal in reference only
to the lips.3 We remember the repulsive salmonlike lips of the double agent
Lippanchenko, Apollon Apollonovich’s grotesque greenish ears, and Gogolian
noses in the crowds on Nevsky and other Petersburg streets, but we probably
don’t remember the backs.4 An online search of the text corroborates my claim
that they are more common in Petersburg than ears and noses; noses are even lo-
cated behind the back sometimes. Describing the rushing people on the streets
of the city, the narrator tells us that a nose was smashed on someone’s back. In
Bely’s representation of the modern city, its anonymous inhabitants and indi-
vidual pedestrians traverse the city by following other pedestrians, including
the relentless swarming crowds, from behind. Despite the multiple references
to lips, the back carries greater meaning in the novel than any other body part,
both in narrative and symbolic terms. Though there are fewer references to it,
the mouth, discussed in the next chapter, is the only possible exception.
There are more than 120 references to the back, not including the spine
and spinal fluid, back of the head, shoulders, tail, and other semantically related
lexical items.5 Fyodor Stepun’s analysis of the novel in 1934 reveals a similar
readerly intuition: “Not only souls, but even bodies are taken apart: we see only
heads, shoulders, noses, backs of heads, backs,” he writes, emphasizing, except
for the nose, not the front of the body but its back.6
The first recorded comparison of Petersburg and The Man Who Was Thursday
is by Roman Timenchik, who, according to Yury Tsivian, noted the affiliation
of brain and bomb in both novels.7 As Alexander Lavrov has shown recently,
Bely did read Chesterton’s novel, but he could not have done so before writing
Petersburg, reading the work probably only in 1916. The Man Who Was Thursday
was translated into Russian in 1914, after the publication of Petersburg in serial
form, and Bely did not know English well enough to have read Chesterton’s
novel in the original.8
The similarities between the two novels are indeed quite remarkable.
Beside the anarchist conspiracy, police surveillance, double agency, apocalyp-
tic sunsets, and prominence of Sunday’s back, modern London and Petersburg
are represented as phantasmagoric apocalyptic cities populated by neurotics;
Ba c ks , Su d d e n l y s, a n d S u r v e i l l a n c e 33

men’s brains explode like bombs; law and order is contested by chaos and sub-
versive political activity; reality has a dualistic—light and dark—visage; the
body of the chief conspirator is repulsively fat and shapeless, the back of his
head evoking the image of an eyeless face, as we saw in the quoted passage; and
dominoes appear at masquerade balls, with the main characters generally re-
sembling masks rather than psychological portraits and the chief conspirator in
Petersburg appearing in costume at a masquerade ball. In an essay on detective
fiction, Chesterton wrote that “the detective story is [. . .] a drama of masks and
not of faces. [. . .] It is a masquerade ball in which everybody is disguised as
somebody else.”9
Instead of direct influence, however, the similarities between Petersburg and
The Man Who Was Thursday have something to do with imaginative literature’s
response to the political bombings and attendant sociopolitical angst in Ed-
wardian England and early twentieth-century Russia. A curious case in this re-
gard was the apocalyptic terrorist novel Pale Horse (Kon’ Blednyi ) by Boris Savin-
kov, one of the masterminds of the assassination of the minister of the interior
Vyacheslav von Plehve, which served as the subtext of Savinkov’s as well as
Bely’s novels. Savinkov, according to Bely, was one of the prototypes of Peters-
burg ’s young anarchist conspirator Alexander Dudkin.10 The Pale Horse, which
Bely must have read, was published under the pseudonym Ropshin and serial-
ized in the journal Russkaia mysl’ in 1909.11
Among the constants of this kind of fiction were terrorist anarchists—
typically of foreign origin—spies, double agents, police, and detectives operat-
ing in a sinister—“phantasmagoric” in the terms of Walter Benjamin—modern
metropolis full of intrigue. Bely’s chief conspirator Lippanchenko is described
by the narrator as a Semite or a Mongol, suggesting alienness. Another well-
known example of the genre was Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907), perhaps
the first detective novel linked to actual political events and acts of terrorism in
London. Like Petersburg, it represented characters associated with the anarchist
plot as fin-de-siècle degenerates, a contemporary term for neurotics.12 And like
Chesterton and Bely afterward, Conrad linked conspiracy and detection to
cosmic chaos and deployed the human back in ways that are notable. Accord-
ing to Lavrov, Bely may have read Secret Agent after it appeared in Russian in
Vestnik Evropy in 1908, shortly before he started working on Petersburg, but there
is no evidence that he had.13
The detective story, an urban genre that emerged in the middle of the nine-
teenth century, represents the dark side of the city as the space of danger with
the purpose of making sense of modernity’s threat to traditional order. Chester-
ton writes in “A Defence of Detective of Stories” (1901) that the city in a detective
34       

story “is a chaos of conscious forces,” not unconscious ones. It is also a self-
reflexive genre in the sense that it is about a narrative that examines itself, espe-
cially its plot, as it makes the modern city readable. Petersburg is certainly self-
reflexive in more ways than one. To quote Chesterton once again on detective
fiction: “Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic
skyline of chimney pots seems wildly and derisively signaling the meaning of
the mystery. [. . .] there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is
not actually a deliberate symbol.”14 We could add that these characteristics
also define the fiction with a terrorist plot that emerged at the beginning of the
twentieth century and was inspired by modern urban anarchism. Even the
master of the detective genre, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote a story in 1904
(“The Golden Pince-Nez,” from The Return of Sherlock Holmes) with such a plot,
in which he associates anarchist activity in London with revolutionaries in
Russia. It is from such a perspective that I will examine Petersburg, considering it
through the prisms of double agency, police surveillance, and detection.
Petersburg ’s references to Crime and Punishment, a crime novel, are a scholarly
commonplace, yet Bely’s novel has not been examined in relation to the detec-
tive genre. Except for Robert Alter, it seems that no one has suggested such an
approach, but Alter only refers to the relevance of the detective genre, without
actually discussing Petersburg in its terms.15 Like Crime and Punishment, the story
line of Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, the young revolutionary conspirator who
is initially called the Stranger (we learn his name only later), contains elements
of a detective story. Similarly, Petersburg abounds in policemen and detectives,
but in contrast to Dostoevsky’s novel, double agency subverts their role of up-
holding the moral and social order, reflecting the ambivalent message of the
terror and Petersburg’s subversion of the moral aspect of the detective novel.
We are alerted to the detective genre in Petersburg by Dudkin, who tells
Nikolay Apollonovich Ableukhov, to whom he delivers the bomb intended
for Ableukhov’s father, that he is currently reading Conan Doyle. He also tells
Nikolay that he is reading the book of Revelation, a history of Gnosticism, and
the church fathers Isaac the Syrian and Gregory of Nyssa. Except for Conan
Doyle, the list consists of spiritual writing, suggesting that the popular Sherlock
Holmes is appropriated by Bely into the spiritual sphere, on the order of Ches-
terton’s projection of the detective genre onto the plane of metaphysics.16
According to Abram Reytblat, Sherlock Holmes became a popular detec-
tive figure in Russia between 1902 and 1904, even though Conan Doyle’s books
had appeared already in the 1890s. In 1904 the Sytin publishing house, one of
Russia’s biggest publishers, brought out a collected edition of Conan Doyle as
a free supplement to the popular journal Vokrug sveta (Around the World ), which
Ba c ks , Su d d e n l y s, a n d S u r v e i l l a n c e 35

contributed greatly to the enormous popularity of Sherlock Holmes in Russia

that lasted for many years.17
Vladislav Khodasevich writes that Bely conceptualized Petersburg at the
time when Russian society was rocked by the exposure of the tsarist Okhrana’s
(secret police) perfidious policing of political and cultural life.18 The most un-
settling event was, of course, the exposure of Evno Azef, the organizer of several
important assassination plots and police spy, as a double agent in 1908. Bely
writes that he served as Lippanchenko’s prototype, claiming that he was
shocked to learn many years later that while he was working on Petersburg, Azef
was living in Berlin—after the debacle—under the assumed name Lipchenko!19
The coincidence in names is truly astonishing.
My approach to the novel, which can be described as an interrogation that
places the entire narrative under surveillance, is an attempt to reread the novel
in the context of the terrorist acts that both outraged Russian society and made
it profoundly anxious about the uncertain state of affairs. The approach, which
can be described as Foucauldian, resembles what D. A. Miller in The Novel and
the Police calls an authorial “intervention [that] marks an explicit bringing-
under-surveillance of the entire world of the narrative.”20 Bely does this pre-
cisely: just about everyone in Petersburg—except for the elder Ableukhov’s errant
wife—spies on everybody else. Like in his other novels, suggests Khodasevich,
he deploys “spies, eavesdroppers, and instigators” everywhere.21 Writing that
the novel emerged out of 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.”22
The obsession with surveillance helps explain Bely’s emphasis on the
human back in Petersburg. Thinking synecdochally, as did Bely, it is an obvious
object of surveillance, but Bely also makes the back a surreptitious spying ve-
hicle. Like Gogol in the Petersburg Tales, in which body parts assume a super-
natural life of their own, Bely fragments the body and endows its parts with
“displaced” metonymic power. (I am using “displaced” in the Russian futurist
sense of sdvig.) Among the more predictable body parts that are enlisted in the
novel’s policing project are ears, which not only listen but look (in chapter 1,
Apollon Apollonovich’s green ear looks at Dudkin from behind the carriage
window), and eyes—the mainstay of detective fiction—which cast penetrating
gazes and watch unobtrusively but are also subjects of displaced metaphors.
Eyes and the gaze, real and phantasmic, inform the representation of bodies
moving through urban space as rapid shifts, or displacements, of close-ups and
views from a distance—for example, in the confrontation of the senator’s and
36       

Dudkin’s eyes on the corner of Nevsky at the beginning of the novel. Thus
futurist sdvig becomes part of the novel’s detection project. But let us start with
content.
Petersburg abounds in anonymous policemen passing by other characters,
standing on corners, and guarding public buildings and monuments. Accord-
ing to Khodasevich, Bely was personally obsessed by police surveillance, re-
sponding to the police in truly paranoid terms. What makes Khodasevich’s
observation revealing is his comment that Bely imagined demonic conspira-
tors located behind the backs of the police—whether it was the director of the
department or a simple janitor.23 Petersburg is full of references to the policing
activities of the Ministry of the Interior, with which Apollon Apollonovich
Ableukhov, the novel’s institutional vampiric ear, is affiliated; to double agents
working both sides of the political conspiracy; to family members, especially
father and son (Apollon and Nikolay Ableukhov) and husband and wife (Sofia
and Sergey Likhutin) spying on each other by peeping into keyholes, bringing
domesticity under surveillance as well; and, most importantly, to the narrator
spying on his characters. In the self-reflexive discussion of his role in chapter 1,
the narrator, in which he refers to himself as detective, speaks of the need to
“investigate” (obsledovat’ ) the soul of the Stranger (Dudkin), whose party alias is
Neulovimyi, which means “elusive” or “imperceptible”: one who cannot be
caught. The narrator, like a detective, uncovers in this scene and elsewhere
that which is hidden.
The subsection “Our Role,” referring to the narrator’s and reader’s role
(the reader is addressed directly in the subsequent subsection), begins with the
following comment: “The streets of Petersburg possess one indubitable quality:
they turn passersby into shadows; Petersburg’s streets, on the other hand, turn
shadows into people” ( 36). So the narrative describes the streets in terms of
back-and-forth reciprocal movement, which spatializes the narrative. The mes-
sage is that the city is a slippery conspiratorial space in which identity is un-
stable, even unreadable. Transmogrification is accomplished by a process re-
sembling cinematic double exposure or morphing, which Bely had described in
his 1907 essay “The City.”24 Posing a threat to the narrative—and to the narra-
tor, who may lose control of it at any moment—the phantasmagoric metropolis
must be kept under constant surveillance. Walter Benjamin describes the Paris
of the second half of the nineteenth century as a city during the “terror, when
everyone is something of a conspirator, [when] everybody will be in the position
of having to play detective.”25 He also makes this observation in reference to the
stories of Edgar Allan Poe (whose writings Bely admired), giving special atten-
tion to “The Man of the Crowd,” calling it the prototypical detective story.
Ba c ks , Su d d e n l y s, a n d S u r v e i l l a n c e 37

That story is set in shadowy London, in which a flâneur, idly observing

the passersby from a distance through a plate-glass window, sees a man who
arouses his interest and suspicion because he does not fit any of the standard
city types that the narrator identifies using the principles of physiognomy,
which had been popularized in the late eighteenth century by J. K. Lavater. He
is compelled to follow the man of the crowd and is transformed from spectator
into detective, a figure that pursues the clues, or traces, left by others. Poe’s
story opens with the statement that “it was well said of a certain German book
that ‘er lasst [es lässt] sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read.”26 This
is precisely what transpires: the anonymous narrator fails to read the soul of the
anxious, shadowy “stranger” (the same sobriquet that Bely uses for Dudkin27),
whom he follows in the labyrinths of London for twenty-four hours. The failure
to read the stranger reflects the impenetrability—“unreadability” in Poe’s as
well as Michel de Certeau’s terms28—of the modern man of the crowd. The
narrator imagines him to be a criminal, suggesting that that the menacing
urban crowds cloak criminals. This is also the underlying message of much of
Petersburg: the narrator as well as the novel’s characters and readers are often at
a loss as they try to interpret the conspiracies, terrorist and otherwise, that the
author stages in the shadowy city, in which individuals—especially Dudkin—
are swallowed up by the urban crowd, losing their individuality as they become
part of its unintelligible, swarming human sediment. Especially striking in this
regard is the scene in which he is absorbed by the repulsive “oozing sediment”
on Nevsky Prospect, which the narrator describes in terms that prefigure
Benjamin’s notion of urban shock experience: a “crawling shouting centi-
pede,” whose utterances are “woven into one single [meaningless] phrase” that
hovers over Nevsky (256).29
The message of “Our Role” is that the narrator, imitating the police, must
investigate the city’s shadows (also called contours, silhouettes, shady types,
etc.) by following them along city streets from behind, which evokes the novel’s
spatiality, here defined as movement through the city. Tellingly, about half of
the references to the back in Petersburg are to what happens behind it (za spinoi ),
which helps explain the many references to backs, shoulders, and backs of
heads.30 The narrator tells us that he must search public spaces before his char-
acters enter them, straining to hear all conversation in the vicinity and inter-
rogating them for “provocation” and “revolution.” What we may otherwise
consider examples of modernist verbal experiment—the fragments of over-
heard speech, in which the novel abounds—become objects of suspicion and
linguistic monitoring. Such intensive policing of speech contributes to the
novel’s palpably paranoid narrative, which is inspired by the behavior and
38       

feelings of father and son, Dudkin and Lippanchenko, Likhutin and Nikolay’s
love interest Sofia, police tails, and so on.
In “Our Role,” the narrator discloses to the reader that he is Apollon
Apollonovich’s secret agent who anticipates the senator’s desire to have the
Stranger followed and investigated. The suggestion is that the narrator as the
senator’s double has a complicit relationship with the perfidious secret police:
Let us investigate the restaurant . . . We have merely anticipated the desire of
Senator Ableukhov in the natural investigation that we have undertaken—that
the agent of the secret police [okhrannoe otdelenie] would steadfastly follow in the
footsteps of the stranger; the renowned senator would have also picked up the
telephone receiver to pass on his thought to the proper quarters; luckily for him,
he did not know where the stranger lives (but we do). We are accommodating
the senator, and while the flippant agent isn’t doing anything in his department,
we will be that agent.
. . . What sort of agent are we, really? An agent—there is. And he doesn’t
sleep, honest to God, he doesn’t sleep. (37)

After the Stranger disappears through the doors of the dingy restaurant, the
narrator spies two silhouettes in the fog. He pretends to be looking into the
clouds in imitation of an undercover agent, despite his having just put his role
as detective into question, and lets the dark pair pass.
The narrator and senator are also inextricably linked by the novel’s master
trope—“cerebral play” (mozgovaia igra), which the former interrogates in a self-
conscious passage at the end of the first chapter. Typically, the image is qual-
ified as “idle,” suggesting the figure of the flâneur who, according to Benjamin,
when confronted with the shadowy aspect of the modern metropolis is trans-
formed into a detective. “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.”31 Petersburg ’s narrator may be termed a flâneur-
detective whose sharp-eyed ability to surveil the city and its inhabitants turns
his idleness into a useful occupation. So the cerebral play to which Bely’s nar-
rator claims priority serves as the instigator of the phantasmagoric narrative.
Yet he acknowledges that the Stranger is the product of the senator’s idle
thought, a mental form of flânerie, an acknowledgment that reveals the narra-
tor’s shadowy, or uncertain, identity too, and tells the reader that the senator is
at once the product of the author’s fantasy and of his, the narrator’s, cerebral
play: “Apollon Apollonovich has been spun from our brain” (56). In other
words, the senator is the narrator’s double, and together in an unstable, shad-
owy collaboration, the two engender the novel’s plot based on surveillance:
“And let the two shadowing my stranger be real shadows! These two dark
Ba c ks , Su d d e n l y s, a n d S u r v e i l l a n c e 39

shadows [ Lippanchenko and his side-kick Morkovin] will, indeed they will,
follow on the heels of the stranger, just as the stranger follows the senator at close
hand; the aged senator will, my reader, indeed he will, pursue you in his black
carriage, and you will never, ever forget him!” (56). Significantly, like Lippan-
chenko, Morkovin is a double agent.
The novelistic chase has been launched;32 the power of surveillance—
linked to cerebral play and to the uncertain connection between the narrator
and Apollon Apollonovich—has been established, with the reader becoming
part of the shadow play, combining the activities of flânerie and detection.
What we can conclude from this and the preceding passage is that the narrator
also identifies with the police: he affiliates the imagination and the act of cre-
ation with the state, not only with the terrorist bomb throwing that pervades
the novel. We can also conclude that instead of a single detective, the role is dis-
persed, which is characteristic of the anarchist spy novel such as Chesterton’s
and Conrad’s. Petersburg ’s shifting spatial perspectives and planes of narration,
which produce altered, frequently unreliable repetition of certain events, fur-
ther disperse as well as subvert detection in the narrative.
Such narration is reminiscent of representation in cubist painting, which
fragments the point of view and engages the unexpected. It shatters the repre-
sented world into pieces with the purpose of reassembling them into a new
creation characterized by what the futurist Kruchenykh in 1912 called sdvig.
Some of the word paintings produced by Bely can be compared to an explosion
of traditional representational forms, as if mimicking the effect created by the
bomb, which fragments the immediate world into myriad pieces. Describing
his creative process in Arabesques in 1908, Bely compares it to the action of the
bomb-throwing anarchist: “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—splashes of
shards [. . .] the shards of my work are the forms of art [. . .] that explode my
life.”33 Nikolay is compared to a bomb many times and tells Dudkin that he
exploded like a bomb. The image serves as a figuration of the centrifugal, ex-
plosive aspect of the novelistic plot and structure. Speaking colloquially, Bely’s
novel blows the mind; it blows the mind of its heroes. The bomb, an emblem of
the unexpected, can be said to underwrite its disjunctive, fragmentary structure
and its unexpected, explosive poetics.
Caricatures of the effects of exploding bombs appeared frequently in the
many satirical journals, including on their covers, that began to appear in large
numbers after 1905—for example, in the journal Voron (Raven).34 Exploding
bombs also appeared in avant-garde painting, especially during World War I.35
A Russian example coeval with Petersburg was Alexey Kruchenykh’s futurist
Cover of inaugural issue of Voron, a satirical journal, 1905 (courtesy of the Institute of Modern
Russian Culture, Los Angeles)
Olga Rozanova, cover of Alexei Kruchyonykh’s book of poetry Vzorval’, 1913 (courtesy of the
Institute of Modern Russian Culture, Los Angeles)
42       

book of poetry titled Vzorval’ (Explosivity, 1913), whose cover was illustrated by
his wife, the Russian futurist Olga Rozanova, with an emblematic abstract rep-
resentation of the futurist neologism.
In the subsection “And His Face Glistened,” which follows “Our Role,” the
narrator expatiates on the unexpected as figured by the adverb “suddenly,” to
whose importance the reader has already been alerted, having been told earlier
that “we will speak about suddenly later” (34). The standard narrative function
of “suddenly” is to catch the reader unawares. Vladimir Toporov considers it
one of the discursive markers of the Petersburg text, which according to him is
headed toward destruction and which “suddenly” represents. Viktor Shklov-
sky, who claimed that Dostoevsky loved to deploy “suddenly” in his fiction, de-
scribes it as “a word about the fragmentation of life, about its uneven stair-
case,” whose unevenness no foot can forecast in advance.36 Shklovsky’s image
of “suddenly” can be illustrated by the Bronze Horseman galloping through
Petersburg streets and up the staircase to Dudkin’s garret, which appropriately
is preceded by the adverb.
The narrator of Petersburg describes “suddenly” as “that notorious word . . .
which interrupts everything” (36). He then addresses and tells the reader that

“Suddenlys” are known to you. Why then do you hide your head in your feathers
like an ostrich as the fateful and inevitable “suddenly” approaches? If a stranger
were to start talking to you about “suddenly,” you would probably say:
“Kind Sir, excuse me, it must be that you are an inveterate decadent.”
[. . .] you know . . . very well . . . the inevitable “suddenly.” [. . .]
Your “suddenly” sneaks up behind your back, sometimes, however, it pre-
cedes your appearance in a room; in the first case, you are very upset: an un-
pleasant sensation develops in your back as if an unseen gang has shoved into
your back as into an open door; you turn around and ask the hostess:
“Madam, won’t you permit me to close the door; I have a certain nervous
sensation: I hate sitting with my back to an open door.” [. . .]
Everyone laughs. You laugh too, as if there were no “suddenly” here.
Sometimes an alien “suddenly” looks at you from behind the shoulder of an
interlocutor, wanting to sniff your “suddenly.” Your “suddenly” feeds on your
cerebral play; it devours your vileness with pleasure, then it swells while you
melt like a candle. If your thoughts are vile, having stuffed itself like a fattened,
though invisible dog, “suddenly” starts to precede you everywhere [. . .] as if
you had been veiled from the gaze by a black cloud invisible to the gaze: this is
the shaggy “suddenly,” your loyal house sprite. (39)

Bely nominalizes “suddenly” and represents it from different spatial perspec-

tives and invests in each one the threatening power of surveillance, as if
Ba c ks , Su d d e n l y s, a n d S u r v e i l l a n c e 43

“suddenly” has acquired what Foucault and Edward Soja affiliate with con-
trolling panoptic vision (see the introduction to this volume).37 Moreover, the
embodiment of a part of speech that refers to time—one of the many remark-
able linguistic displacements in the novel—spatializes time by endowing it with
a repulsive canine body. “That notorious word” represents the kind of self-
conscious spatialization of narrative by means of multistoried metaphors that
abound in Petersburg.
As the novel’s reader is devoured by “suddenly,” the adverb takes over: it
assumes the shape of a sniffing dog; growing fat, it precedes the reader in phys-
ical space, or it hides behind his back; in the end, it morphs into a repulsive
black cloud filled with the reader’s vile thoughts. This astonishing chain of sur-
real metamorphoses has been engendered by the narrator and his penchant for
idle cerebral play. But what do these metaphorized images have to do with the
human back?
Common in pulp fiction, especially detective writing, “suddenly” marks a
narrative shift. There are countless instances of it in Petersburg, as there are in
Crime and Punishment, in which “suddenly” appears only in its original adverbial
sense. Bely’s discourse, however, suggests that the shadowy “suddenly” is dis-
satisfied with its humble adverbial role. When it expands beyond its grammat-
ical boundaries, suggests the narrator, it instills readerly anxiety. An embodi-
ment of evil, “suddenly” exists behind the back of the reader, who fears its
unexpected, shocking appearance—for instance, through an open door. Of
neuter gender (tvoe vdrug ) and metaphorized as a sniffing police dog trying to
detect “the reader’s” scent, the shaggy “suddenly” appropriates the role of
detective for a moment, catching him unawares too: it sniffs out the scent of
the conspirator—be it a bomb thrower or double agent—from behind his back.
In the subsequent passage, in which the narrator returns to the figure of the
Stranger that the senator would like to have investigated, “suddenly” morphs
into slime—a demonstrably spatial category—that penetrates behind his collar
and oozes down his spine, the most sensitive part of the body. Invisible at first,
the formless repulsive slime morphs into the fat and formless Lippanchenko, a
double agent, who emerges from the bloblike “suddenly.”
The chain of transmogrifications suggests an incongruity: the fusion of “sud-
denly,” a point in time, and patently spatial slime. This paradoxical fusion of
time and space reflects, I would suggest, the novel’s peculiar chronotope, sym-
bolized by the suddenness of the bomb explosion and the attendant oozing body
fluids that define Petersburg ’s timeless viscous imaginary (see the next chapter).
The novel typically juxtaposes sudden, unexpected action, and expansive meta-
phoric passages in which viscous substances bring time to a virtual standstill, or
44       

as the narrative claims, time enters the “fourth dimension.” This is what I have
detected after carefully surveilling the novel and after considering it in regard
to Foucault’s claim that the twentieth century is an epoch of space in which
simultaneity and dispersal have overtaken the earlier hegemony of time.38 The
chain of disgusting transformations of “suddenly” ultimately reveals the uncer-
tainty of the world of shadows and especially of time in it, punctuated here by
the instability of the temporal adverb and the novel’s penchant for spatializing
time: instead of a suspense-building point in time in a detective novel, Peters-
burg ’s “suddenly” paradoxically retards it.
Herald of the unexpected and embodiment of the novel’s panoptic surveil-
lance mechanism at its most duplicitous and all-seeing, Lippanchenko has a
surreal second face on the back of his body, thereby controlling what happens
behind him. Located in the deep fold of his neck, between the back and back of
his head, this face is more monstrous than the other: it is eyeless, noseless, and
toothless, like the terrifying second face of the chief conspirator in The Man Who
Was Thursday quoted earlier. When Dudkin visits Lippanchenko later, he is
struck by the second, monstrous face, which he hadn’t noticed before, and by
the fact that Lippanchenko offers him his back “mockingly,” revealing the
other face. In an effort to save face, Dudkin does the same. There ensues a
power play, with the two taking turns turning their backs to each other and
then turning around again. This results in the representation of the palpable
body from all vantage points—front and back, back and forth—and in motion,
like in cubist painting. Predictably, Lippanchenko, despite his discomfort (he
senses some kind of danger) wins the game, remaining omniscient, which he
had been up to this point as the novel’s policing double agent, more so than his
narrator or his (the narrator’s) government patron Apollon Apollonovich.39
Lippanchenko seems omniscient until his sudden demise at the hands of
Dudkin, who first slits open his back and only then his belly. In fact, instead of
Apollon Apollonovich, the object of Lippanchenko’s terrorist plot, it is he who
is killed in the end—by the hand of his subordinate. And even though Petersburg
is premised on a conspiracy of evil, represented by Lippanchenko, his murder
suggests the victory of the state and of the Ableukhov family, no matter how
compromised both are: the senator survives the bomb explosion and is re-
united with his wife; in the epilogue, he thinks lovingly of his son and anxiously
awaits his return.
To return to the conspiracy, however, and its affiliation with the back of the
body: in the senator’s encounter with Lippanchenko’s menacing sidekick Mor-
kovin, whose police name is Vorovkin, an anagram of the first, the narrative
represents his double agency by featuring his back. Before identifying Morkovin
Ba c k s , Su d d e n l y s , a n d S u r v e i l l a n ce 45

with his fixed metonymic image—“the man with a wart”—it is displaced by his
back:

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov [. . .] screamed [. . .] in pursuit of the back

running somewhere . [. . .] But the back didn’t listen (actually, not the back, but
the ears running above the back). [. . .] There the fleetingly glimpsed back
stopped, turning its head there, and recognizing the senator, ran toward him
(not the back ran toward him, but its owner—the man with the wart). (187)

Besides winking knowingly at the reader, the narrator highlights the af-
filiation of policing and double agency with Morkovin’s shadowy backside,
playfully fragmenting the body into its constituent synechdocal parts: back,
eavesdropping running ears, and, in the end, the familiar wart. But it is the
back—metaphorizing and spatializing the unknown and danger—that inter-
ests us the most. In this regard, Apollon Apollonovich’s fear that he is suffering
from tabes dorsalis, which he associates with death, is noteworthy. Ultimately
then, the back in Petersburg is linked to death, the most feared unknown, which
is lurking behind the senator’s, as well as Lippanchenko’s, back; everyone’s for
that matter.40
As we know from detective narratives, certain details, especially seemingly
insignificant ones, are invested with enormous import, because the secret in
detective fiction is located in the seemingly insignificant trifle, not in obvious
places: hence Chesterton’s claim that every twist in the street, chimney stack,
and brick points to the mystery. Like the detective, we seek to arrange the insig-
nificant details and seemingly fortuitous events into a meaningful constellation.
I am not suggesting that meaning in Petersburg is hidden away in trifles, such as
the “back” or “suddenly,” but the novel’s literary power lies in the unexpected
verbal and bodily detail subject to displacement. The reader has first to detect,
then decipher, and finally relish the displaced images that continue to fascinate
us today, while those of us who are interested in Bely’s visual imagination take
pains to identify the comparable visual practices of the time, whether cubism,
which Nikolay Berdyaev proposed in 1916, or expressionism, as I will do in
chapter 3.
The multifaceted representation of the back in the scene in which Dudkin
has crossed Nikolaevsky Bridge after delivering the bomb to the senator’s house
and right after passing The Bronze Horseman is remarkable in this regard. He re-
turns by way of the famed statue, which was guarded by a palace grenadier.41

The experiences dragged after him like a tail flying off, but invisible to the
eye; Alexander Ivanovich experienced these experiences in reverse order, his
46       

consciousness retreating into the tail, meaning the back: it seemed to him in
those minutes that his back opened up and from the back, as out of a door,
something resembling the body of a giant prepared to hurl itself into the abyss:
his experience of today’s twenty-four hours was this body of the giant; the expe-
riences began to smoke like a tail.
Alexander Ivanovich was thinking that when he returned home, the events
of today’s twenty-four hours would come crashing through the door; yet he
would try to slam the door on them, tearing the tail from the back, but the tail
would come crashing in anyway. (98)

The phantasmagoric image of a giant emerging from Dudkin’s back

suggests the figure of The Bronze Horseman, the city’s genius loci and the novel’s
symbol of panoptic power. It is as if the Horseman is suddenly inside Dudkin’s
body, from which he breaks out—from the back. The suggestion is that the two
were momentarily one, or that the Horseman is Dudkin’s double and that the
duplicity, as in the discourse on Lippanchenko and “suddenly,” takes place be-
hind the back. The description of Dudkin’s experiences of the day and their se-
quence embodies time and spatializes it. Moreover, it plays with the relation-
ship of back and tail. As in English, the colloquial “tail” means “detective” in
Russian and suggests that Dudkin is under surveillance, which he is—from all
sides. It includes The Bronze Horseman, the most powerful tail of all and the all-
seeing panoptic eye of the city, who surveils it from a bird’s-eye view on Senate
Square. So cutting the tail off, which relocates the tail into its animal context,
refers to Dudkin’s desire to lose his pursuer, something that he imagines doing
by crushing the tail between the door and door frame in his garret (recollect the
open door through which “suddenly” enters), but as the narrator tells us, he
will be unsuccessful. The image prefigures the Horseman’s later pursuit of
Dudkin to his garret, where the former “pours into his veins in metals” (307)—
one of the novel’s many metamorphic images—which reveals that the pursuer
and pursued merge into one once again. The fusion—or is it displacement?—
will be parodied in the end, as Dudkin sits astride Lippanchenko’s corpse, arm
outstretched in the manner of The Bronze Horseman. And if we consider the shift-
ing spatial distance between the Horseman and Dudkin, so characteristic of
modernist representation, we can conclude that it reflects Georg Simmel’s de-
scription of it in Philosophical Culture (Philosophische Kultur, 1911) as “the experienc-
ing 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.”42
We are told that Dudkin refers to his experiences that day—in reverse
order, like in a palindrome, from tail to back. In this regard, the giant emerging
from his back evokes the earlier figuration of “suddenly” imaged as the slime
Ba c ks , Su d d e n l y s, a n d S u r v e i l l a n c e 47

that took the form of Lippanchenko, who had followed the Stranger into the
cheap restaurant. Among the vile thoughts that “suddenly” feeds on may very
well be those that concern assassination. After all, Alexander Ivanovich, him-
self a notorious revolutionary, had just delivered the bomb intended for Apol-
lon Apollonovich to his son. Yet vile thoughts affiliated with the backside of the
body may also suggest same-sex desire, which, I would suggest, is the repressed
underside of desire in the novel that I will discuss in the next chapter. This
hidden aspect of Petersburg is for us to detect, or not, and depends on our her-
meneutic approach, whether we choose to “queer” the text or not.
The most enigmatic image in the passage, however, is that drawn by the
locution “experiences of the day smoked like a tail” (zadymilis’ khvostom). In an
earlier chapter, Dudkin looks out the window from the Ableukhov mansion
and sees “a network of black smokestacks very far away spewing smoke into the
sky. And the smoke fell in the shape of tails above the darkly colored waters”
(85). “Tail,” which in Russian also refers to a long streak of smoke in the shape
of a coil, is used here in yet another figurative sense. This particular figurative
meaning informs the image “smoked like a tail,” evoking the factory smoke
stacks on the islands where Dudkin lives. Visually, the related collocation stolby
dymovye (literally, “smoking columns”) brings to mind the colloquial phrase
khvost truboi, meaning “not to lose heart”; literally it means to keep one’s tail
high like a smokestack. In the larger context of the novel, the metaphor “expe-
riences smoked like a tail” may be read as a reference to the revolution, which
is going to hurl itself across the bridge from the islands in the shape of an anon-
ymous and formless working-class mass, threatening the narrator, Apollon
Apollonovich, and, we are told, the reader.
Yet the collocation may simply be read as a literal reference to the tail of
The Bronze Horseman’s steed on which the monument rests; it remains an archi-
tectural conversation piece even today. Immediately following the above pas-
sage and making a shift in the spatial cum temporal perspective, the narrator
depicts the Horseman galloping to the Neva and stopping in his tracks with
front hoofs raised, ready to leave the pedestal at any moment, so that the image
of the smoking tail can also be perceived as a foreshadowing of the Horseman’s
meteoric ride across the bridge to Dudkin’s garret, where he arrives in “very
green billowing smoke” (305). The affiliation of the galloping Horseman and of
the billowing smoke after the bomb explosion in the Ableukhov mansion later
engages the novel’s revolutionary aspect as well, which is represented by the
islands’ factory smokestacks.
I have produced a meticulous close reading of this seemingly insignificant
yet multistoried image to show the complex chain of displacements and meta-
morphoses deployed in Petersburg with the purpose of exploring its hallucinatory
48       

image-making that virtually brings novelistic action to a halt. It does this by

spatializing time through a proliferation of images with multiple layers of
meaning, or as Shklovsky would have it, by substituting image-making for plot.
Bely’s displaced images resemble those that Vladimir Mayakovsky and the
cubo-futurists used in great profusion. It is important to remember that the
novel was coeval with the first radical experiments in Russian poetry by Maya-
kovsky and Boris Pasternak, whose use of sdvig was not unlike that of Bely. Not
unlike Bely, the cubo-futurists referred to bombs in discussing their experimen-
tation with language. Describing the intended effect of the 1910 manifesto Sadok
sudei (A Trap for Judges) on the symbolists, the artist Mikhail Matyushin wrote
that they hardly noticed it, “considering the bomb an ordinary party cracker,”
although in an unpublished manuscript, he claimed that “the little book . . .
fell like a bomb into the meeting of ‘mystics’ at Vyach[eslav] Invanov’s. The
Burlyuks very piously penetrated the literary meeting at Vyach. Ivanov’s ‘stick-
ing’ the Trap into everyone’s coats, greatcoats, into each pocket a copy of the
Trap.”43 The meeting significantly took place at Ivanov’s famed Tower, which
in the spirit of Roland Barthes, or Petersburg’s caryatid, looked down on the city
from its hallowed bird’s-eye view.
Bely’s reader, in other words, must also be a detective who sniffs out the
author’s displaced images, which frequently are hiding behind the backs of
words. Even though the surface conspiracy is what the narrative ostensibly sur-
veils, I believe that Bely wants the reader to investigate and decipher the hidden
verbal representational conspiracy against the traditional literary order, the
same one at which Bely and the cubo-futurists threw their metaphoric bombs.
Accordingly, the early disquisition on “suddenly” may be seen as instructing
the reader about the author’s strategies of displacement and morphing.
Yet like Poe’s narrator as spectator turned detective, we remain unsure of
the meaning of the text. It is not only the modern metropolis, with its multiple
sign systems and grids, that makes Bely’s city novel opaque, or unreadable in
Poe’s as well as Benjamin’s terms, but also the multiple interpretive possibilities
of the multilayered images that the author deploys in it: the “pictures of illu-
sions,” as the narrator tells us, the author hangs everywhere and takes down.
Petersburg in the final analysis is a text that “does not permit itself to be read,”
confounding finalized detection, like Poe’s “A Man of the Crowd.” It does,
however, engage our readerly detective instincts, which offer widely differing
interpretations of the novel’s many clues as we follow them from behind—at
street level and from a bird’s-eye view—in the manner of the narrator and his
characters. But contrary to what de Certeau writes (see the introduction to this
volume), the close-up, or street view, is open to interpretation instead of being
Ba c ks , Su d d e n l y s, a n d S u r v e i l l a n c e 49

unreadable, despite the illegibility of the urban crowd, or in Bely’s terms, of the
human swarm. What I am suggesting is that we consider the interplay of the
following physical and mental spatial categories in the novel: back/front,
close/far, and up/down.

I f we consider Petersburg as thematizing surveillance from a Platonic per-

spective, however, its representation of the back, as well as that in The Man Who
Was Thursday, evokes the allegory of the cave. Like Plato, Chesterton and Bely
distinguish between spiritual and material space and between a higher,
transcendent reality and the prison-world of appearances. The unenlightened,
according to the allegory, have no access to the higher reality; they only see its
reflection figured as shadows on the cave wall. In Petersburg there are countless
such descriptions of shadows on the city walls and on the walls of the city’s
interior spaces. As the narrator tells us, Petersburg streets “transform passersby
into shadows” that are then projected onto the walls by the lights behind them.
The Platonic allegory represents the unenlightened as prisoners chained to
the cave, unable to turn their heads and see the fire that burns behind them,
which in spatial terms suggests that they are unable to see the fire from a read-
able spatial perspective. That fire represents the unknown, which lurks behind
their backs. They can only see the wall in front of them, onto which the puppe-
teers project shadows of people and of objects from behind. Because the pris-
oners are not able to see the real people and objects behind them, they mistake
the world of appearances for reality. They misread it! In Petersburg the allegory of
the cave can be applied to all the major characters, especially Lippanchenko’s
prisoner, Dudkin. The novel’s sinister puppeteer has turned Alexander Ivano-
vich into a shadow, a condition from which he finds no exit except through
murder. Despite his search for enlightenment—by reading Nietzsche, spiritual
books, and detective fiction—and his desperate effort to disentangle himself
from the sinister assassination plot, Dudkin fails to escape the cave and ends
up going mad. As he tells Nikolay a few days beforehand, Lippanchenko has
spread-eagled him on the wall of his attic room while also haunting him in the
shape of a shadow—a damp yellow spot—on its dingy wallpaper.
Whether Apollon Apollonovich and Nikolay Apollonovich gain enlighten-
ment is highly debatable, although they seem to have achieved a kind of peace
in the epilogue. In any case, they have escaped the claustrophobic modern city
that is under total surveillance, which is trapped in the allegorical cave that
cannot be read. They find themselves instead in the desert in North Africa or
the wide expanses of Russia, away from Petersburg’s claustrophobic walls and
able to see themselves and others more legibly from a peaceful distance. No
50       

longer the object and subject of detection, the son seeks enlightenment, first in
ancient Egyptian teachings and then in the ideas of the domestic philosopher
Grigory Skovoroda, who has been called a Ukrainian Socrates.
Time moves slowly and evenly in the epilogue, in contrast to the body
of the novel, where unexpected suddenlys are juxtaposed to hallucinatory im-
ages that interrupt the narrative flow to enhance the atmosphere of paranoia
and anxiety. Although shadows of people and objects projected onto flat sur-
faces still figure in the epilogue, the narrative seems to have let go of its earlier
obsession with what happens behind the back, what Chesterton describes as
“the part of man that he knows nothing of.” The same can be said about the
fascination of both novelists with “the strange impression produced [by the
back] on those behind.” Although death lurks in the epilogue more than in
the earlier parts of the novel, its unknown qualities are no longer embodied in
the back.


An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance in
Andrej Belyj’s Petersburg,” in Russian Literature, Special Issue: Andrej Belyj—On the Occasion
of His 125th Birthday 58, no. 1/2 (2005).
1. G. K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts (London: Duckworth, 1904), 62–63.
2. G. K. Chesterton, The Annotated Thursday: G. K. Chesterton’s Masterpiece, The Man
Who Was Thursday, annotated by Martin Gardner (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999),
245–46.
3. The only critics who have noted the importance of back imagery in the novel are
its English language translators Robert Maguire and John Malmstad. See the notes in
Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 320.
4. Here is an example of a typical nasological passage: “Noses flowed in large num-
bers: eagle noses, rooster noses, duck noses, chicken and so on . . . ; a nose wrenched
to the side and a nose not wrenched at all: greenish, green, pale, red and white. This
all streamed toward them from the street: without meaning, hurriedly, in abundance”
(Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov [Moscow: Nauka, 1981], 254). Subsequent
page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text.
5. There are over 120 references to lips, 101 to noses (which were made famous in
Russian literature by Gogol), 98 to ears, and close to 50 to mouths.
6. Fyodor Stepun, “Pamiati Andreia Belogo,” in Vospominaniia ob Andree Belom, ed.
V. M. Piskunova (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 184.
7. Quoted in Yu. G. Tsivian, Istoricheskaia retseptsiia kino: Kinematograf v Rossii, 1896–
1930 (Riga: Zinatne, 1991), 345.
8. Alexander Lavrov, “Andrey Bely mezhdu Konradom i Chestertonom,” Andrey
Bely: Razyskaniia i etiudy (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), 189. Soon after
reading The Man Who Was Thursday Bely told R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik that he intended
to write a novel in the manner of Chesterton, which he never did.
Ba c ks , Su d d e n l y s, a n d S u r v e i l l a n c e 51

9. G. K. Chesterton, “On Detective Novels,” in Generally Speaking (New York:

Dodd, Mead, 1929), 6. For a discussion of the masquerade ball in Petersburg, see the essay
by Cameron Wiggins in this volume.
10. Andrey Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhe-
stvennaia literatura, 1990), 65.
11. The Pale Horse is an autobiographical novel about a terrorist assassination plot in
Moscow. For a discussion of Bely and Savinkov, see the essay by Alexis Peri and Chris-
tine Evans in this volume.
12. For a discussion of what was called degeneration, or degeneracy, in Russian
culture at the turn of the twentieth century, see Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent
Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
13. Lavrov, “Andrey Bely,” 182–83. Secret Agent resembles Petersburg in uncanny
ways, although as I have suggested, the similarities may be the product of the genre.
Conrad’s novel is set in London—a sinister metropolis with a population that resembles
ants or locust (I remind the reader of the description of the crowds on Nevsky as a
swarm and a human centipede). The plot consists of political conspiracy and bomb
throwing; a repulsive fat man as secret agent, police detectives, and members of high so-
ciety are also part of what is a family novel. Some of the secret agents are Russian, rec-
ognizable in the first place by their names. (In The Man Who Was Thursday, an anarchist
cum police agent whose name is Gogol is either Russian or Polish.) The Western press
widely reported the terrorist activity in Russia at the beginning of the century. In his
essay on Bely, Chesterton, and Conrad, Lavrov writes that the latter’s Under Western Eyes
(1911) has even more in common with Bely’s novel, which had been essentially written
by then. This novel, which was translated into Russian in 1912, takes place in the circles
of Russian revolutionary émigrés in Petersburg and Geneva.
Among other novels inspired by the notorious Azef affair (see Alexis Peri and
Christine Evans in this volume) were Mark Aldanov’s Desiataia simfoniia (The Tenth
Symphony, 1930), Roman Gul’s Azef (1959, a revised version of General Bo, 1929), and
Rebecca West’s The Birds Fall Down (1964). Other European novels with an anarchist
terrorist plot or subplot written at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twen-
tieth centuries are Emile Zola’s Germinal (Souvarine, an anarchist who advocates vio-
lence, is Russian), Henry James’s Princess Casamassima (full of descriptions of shadowy
London), and Frank Harris’s The Bomb (based on the anarchist bomb explosion at the
Chicago Haymarket in 1886).
14. G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Detective Stories,” in On Lying in Bed and Other
Essays, ed. Alberto Manguel (Calgary, Alberta: Bayeux Arts, 2000), 282.
15. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 92. See introduction, p. 9.
16. Bely was a fan of Conan Doyle. We read in Nachalo veka that he recognized that
a certain person described his spiritualist experience in the terms of a story by Conan
Doyle (Andrey Bely, Nachalo veka, ed. A. V. Lavrov [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia litera-
tura, 1990], 70). Describing his troubled relationship with the wife of Alexander Blok,
Lyubov Dmitrievna, during 1906, he refers to the role of one of Blok’s closest friends,
Evgeny Ivanov, as that of Sherlock Holmes, suggesting that he served as her private
detective (Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 91).
17. Abram Reytblat, “Detektivnaia literatura i russkii chitatel’ (vtoraia polovina
XIX—nachalo XX vv.),” in Knizhnoe delo v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX—nachale XX veka,
52       

vol. 7 (1994), 133. During those same years, numerous books by Conan Doyle were pub-
lished by such commercial publishers as V. I Gubinsky, M. V. Klyukin, and D. P. Efi-
mov. A complete works was published by P. P. Soykin in 1909, also as a free supplement
to the journal Priroda i liudi. On popular detective fiction in Russia at the beginning of
the twentieth century, see also Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and
Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 141–53.
Among Russian writers of high literature that appreciated Conan Doyle was Vasily
Rozanov, who considered Sherlock Holmes a modern defender of the higher good.
Rozanov compared him to the fictional knight Ammadis of Gaul, writing that Conan
Doyle’s work was inspired by Don Quixote and claiming that this similarity confirms his
view of the modern fictional detective as a modern-day knight (V. V. Rozanov, Opavshie
list’ia. Korob vtoroi i poslednii, in O sebe i zhizni svoei [ Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1990],
382). Perceptively, Rozanov comments on the relationship between Holmes and Wat-
son as a homosexual relationship and compares both to what he called “people of lunar
light” (381–83). The comparison of Holmes to Quixote was also made by Chesterton,
who called the detective a member of the “knight errantry” (Hanson, City and Shore, 18).
This view of the detective is not reaffirmed by Bely.
18. V. F. Khodasevich, “Andrey Bely,” in Nekropol’ (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1976), 84.
In describing the origins of Petersburg, Bely writes that the novel emerged during the diffi-
cult year of 1906. He suffered a breakdown because of his frenzied love for Lyubov Dmi-
trievna Blok, who, as she admits in her memoirs, tormented him with her uncertainty
about whether to leave Blok for him or not (see Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 69–93).
Their romantic triangle serves as the biographical subtext of the love plot in Petersburg.
19. Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 435–36.
20. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), 35.
21. Vladislav Khodasevich, “Ableukhovy—Letaevy—Korobkiny,” in Andrey Bely:
Pro et Contra, ed. A. V. Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Russkii Khristianskii gumanitarnyi insti-
tut, 2004), 749.
22. Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 435.
23. Khodasevich, “Andrey Bely,” 84.
24. See introduction, pp. 6–7.
25. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans.
Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2003), 21. According to Benjamin, the transformation of the flâneur into a detective does
him a lot of good socially, for it legitimates his idleness. I refer to the flâneur’s idleness in
conjunction with the master trope of Petersburg—cerebral play (about which later), which
is typically characterized as “idle.”
26. “The Man of the Crowd,” in The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R.
Thompson (New York: Norton, 2004), 232. See introduction to this volume, note 50.
27. The sociologist Georg Simmel, who studied urban types, identified one of
them as the stranger, about whom he wrote an eponymous essay. Simmel writes that
the stranger exists simultaneously outside and inside the community, represented by the
interplay of closeness and distance. He associates the type with a lack of roots, in the
sense of fixed residence, and of local affiliation, which is how the narrator describes
Ba c ks , Su d d e n l y s , a n d S u r v e i l l a n ce 53

Dudkin when he first appears in the novel (Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Cul-
tural Geography Reader, ed. Timothy S. Oakes and Patricia L. Price [ London: Routledge,
2008], 312–15).
28. See introduction, pp. 9, 15.
29. For a discussion of this scene, see chapter 2, pp. 67–68. The crowd in Petersburg
is described in bodily terms, by means of body fragments, i.e., synecdochically: as noses,
ears, beards, moustaches, shoulders, chins, etc.
30. There are no references to the back on the order of those in Petersburg in Crime
and Punishment, but it is replete with references to “suddenly”—but only in the standard
adverbial sense.
31. Walter Benjamin, “The Flâneur,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 442.
32. Besides the narrator, who follows his characters from behind, Nikolay Apollo-
novich follows Dudkin, Sergey Likhutin follows Nikolay, and so on.
33. Andrey Bely, “Iskusstvo,” Arabeski in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, ed. A. L.
Kazin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 2:200. Bely compared himself to Ivan Kalyaev, the
bomb-throwing assassin of Grand Duke Sergey, in describing his frenzied state caused
by his uncertain relationship with Lyubov Dmitrievna. The chapter in which he de-
scribes this state is titled “The Mask of the Red Death,” a reference to Poe’s eponymous
story (Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 79).
34. The titles of satirical journals commonly inscribed the bomb-throwing violence
that was associated with the terror and with the 1905 Revolution: Moi pulemet, Shrapnel’,
Bomba, Bomby, Puli, Zarnitsy, etc. Metaphoric, naturalistic, and caricatured images of ex-
ploding bombs appeared with great frequency in these journals and in the popular
press, as did photos of the aftermath of some of the more notorious bomb explosions.
35. See, e.g., G. R. W. Nevinson’s A Bursting Shell (1915), which depicted flying
shrapnel, spirals of flame and smoke, and ruins, and Georg Grosz’s Explosion (1917).
36. Viktor Shklovsky, Energiia zabluzhdeniia: kniga o siuzhete (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1981), 279.
37. If Vladimir Toporov views “suddenly” as marking the modality of the Peters-
burg text (V. N. Toporov, “Peterburg i Peterbugskii tekst russkoi literatury,” Trudy
po znakovym sistemam 18 [1984]: 27), Yuri Lotman (writing in the same issue of Trudy po
znakovym sistemam, which was devoted to the semiotics of the city) suggests that the
“suddenly” of Petersburg refers to its creation all at once by the “wave of the hand of the
demiurge,” making such creation utopian and unrealizable (Lotman, “Simvolika Peter-
burga i problemy semiotiki goroda,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 18 [1984]: 35).
38. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22.
39. Gul’s novel Azef deploys the human back in ways that are remarkably similar to
those in Petersburg. Azef feels danger with his back; Azef, like Lippanchenko, sits with his
back to the others, and like Lippanchenko, Burtsev is described as turning into a sniff-
ing dog that resembles Bely’s “suddenly.” Savinkov, the other central character, is also
described from the back. Writing about his play Azef, performed in Paris in the 1930s,
Gul’ remarks that what worked particularly well in the production was the way Azef ’s
back was staged in act 1 (Roman Gul, Ia unes Rossiiu, vol. 2, pt. 2).
40. Bely’s obsession with the back was already in full evidence in his Symphonies,
which abound in the collocation “behind the back,” especially in the Dramatic Symphony.
54       

In Snowstorm Goblet, the back is used synecdochically, just like in Petersburg: The old man
“ran away from the nun with his black hunched back.” A few pages later, Bely depicts
the past staring from behind a woman’s head: “The back that was saddled for her at-
tracted her: there rose from behind the back a large, as if glass, head in a wreath of
silver-white and gray hair that was, so to speak, baring its teeth at her love and looked at
her with a long gaze” (Kubok metelei [Moscow: Skorpion, 1908], 206).
41. The multiple references to the back in this passage come right after the sub-
section depicting a general strike of students and the related massive policing of
Petersburg’s streets and squares. For a discussion of the Nikolavsky Bridge, see the essay
by Lucas Stratton in this volume.
42. Quoted in David Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory
(London: Routledge, 1992), 66.
43. Quoted in V. N. Terekhina, “Kubofuturizm,” in Russkii futurizm: Teoriia, Prak-
tika, Kritika, Vospominaniia, ed. V. N. Terekhina and A. P. Zimenkov (Moscow: Nasledie,
1999), 6.
 2
Poetics of Disgust
To Eat and Die in Petersburg

    

The abject and the loathsome figure prominently in Petersburg. Its poetics are
characterized by a striking grotesque metamorphic imagery that reflects a sen-
sibility inimical to stable representation. The novel dissolves form, thematized,
as we know, by the terrorist bomb—the source of Petersburg ’s fragmentary
structure and imagery.1 Bely’s use of modernist, including cubist, fragmenta-
tion, however, does not tell the whole story, nor does the symbolist or parodic
aspect of the novel. What such approaches to Petersburg overlook is its profound
psycho-visceral affect that engages the reader’s simultaneous fascination and
revulsion, both stimulated especially by those images that represent dissolution
of form (including unshaped biomorphic images) and by those of the dying
imperial city. It is my claim here that disgust animates Bely’s novel and that it
represents its organizing affect.2
Disgust is an aversive emotion that regulates transgressive experience with
the purpose of enforcing social and cultural taboos. It is typically performa-
tive. The disgusting in literature tests the reader’s affective tolerance, gauging
if and when the reader as imaginary spectator averts her mental gaze from an
image that provokes feelings of revulsion. Engaging the interplay of close-up
and distance—key spatial parameters of the modernist representation of the
city—the disgusting has the function of distancing the reader from a text dis-
playing shocking visceral detail that produces emotional recoil. Disgust is always

55
56       

about borders, so that its deployment in the arts can also have a liberating func-
tion by pushing the boundaries of the sensibly and aesthetically permissible,
which invites the reader’s or viewer’s fascination, even delight. In challenging
our senses, the loathsome and shocking can produce delight precisely because
they attack the norms of “civilized moral good” and traditional aesthetic
beauty. The aesthetic sensibility that comes closest to inscribing such conflicted
affect is the baroque, in the generic sense, which tends to extremes and to gro-
tesque representation. In the words of Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “the grotesque
is preeminently the art of disgust.”3 Perhaps the most appropriate aesthetic
label that we can apply to Petersburg is “assymetrical baroque,” which Bely as-
cribes to Nikolay Gogol’s writing.4
Unlike the French degoût and the English disgust, which mean “repugnant
to the taste,” the Russian otvrashchenie comes from a verb that signifies motion.
It refers to the gesture of literally pushing something away with the purpose of
calming visceral and/or moral revulsion. The emotion is associated with taste,
smell, and touch, suggesting an experience close up rather than distanced. As
such, it is associated with the physical properties of decay, bad smell, sliminess,
and stickiness. According to Norbert Elias, disgust marks the “threshold of
repugnance,” which establishes normative social, moral, and emotional be-
haviors that serve the “civilizing process.”5
Turning to literature and using the threshold metaphor as a springboard, I
would suggest that “disgust,” especially in the Russian, spatializes the text by
creating a discursive space for negotiating the reader’s aesthetic, sensual, and
moral values.6 In its spatializing function, it is also a fitting emotion for describ-
ing the conflicted affect evoked by the modern city and by urban sensory shock,
as described by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin.
Considered from the perspective of aesthetics, disgust reveals the reader’s,
or spectator’s, response to dissolution of form, one of whose primary subtexts is
the body that has crossed the threshold of death—the ultimate threshold of re-
pugnance. In the words of Winfried Menninghaus, “every book about disgust
is not least a book about the rotting corpse.”7 Death transforms the body into
a corpse that will eventually dissolve into formless organic ooze—proscribed
by classical aesthetics—which in the end turns into waste. “The corpse, the
most sickening of wastes,” writes Julia Kristeva, “is a border that encroaches
upon everything” and represents the infection of life by death.8 One of the
most controversial corpses in the visual arts is Holbein’s The Body of the Dead
Christ in the Tomb, which represents Christ’s body as the site of death and
decay—utter abjection, in other words—not of sacred and prophetic speech.
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 57

Certainly the response to that painting in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in which it has
an important symbolic as well as emotional function, reveals feelings of pro-
found anxiety in its viewers that subvert their faith in the resurrection.
The gaping mouth, which features prominently in the Holbein, has its ori-
gins not only in the naturalistic corpse but also in the repulsive sight of food and
the idea of eating it. If the previous chapter in this volume demonstrated that
the back is the body part that best embodies the narrative of surveillance and
paranoia, this chapter foregrounds the mouth as the source of revulsion. The
underlying meaning of disgust suggests that our refusal to ingest spoiled food
has to do precisely with affirming life and thereby warding off death, as well as
with the dissolution of meaning that is ultimately rooted in death.
Yet “death is the ‘other side’ of birth,” writes Bakhtin.9 Death in nature pro-
duces the generative rot from which new life is born with the purpose of perpet-
uating the organic life cycle. For the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov
and his follower Andrey Bely, the life cycle was a philosophical source of revul-
sion precisely because it perpetuates death in life. In this regard, the loathsome
in death is the generative excess that originates in putrefying organic matter. It
represents the economy of life: people die and produce the fodder for new
birth, and it is the relationship between life and death—the recognition that op-
posites coexist and dissolve into each other—that is at the heart of the disgust
reflex. This recognition informs baroque and modernist decadent aesthetics,
which bring together the paradigmatic binary pair of opposites, life and death.
Even though the disgust response has been premised on the experience
of something viscerally and morally intolerable from which we typically re-
coil, I would propose that it also mediates its legibility: the act of distancing
helps make the disgusting readable in cognitive terms and facilitates a moral,
as well as a considered, aesthetic response. Such is the impact of Goya’s pro-
foundly disturbing Saturn Devouring His Son, the cannibalistic figure that under-
lies Bely’s Petersburg.10 That nightmarishly grotesque painting, which represents
a cannibalistic close-up, produces recoil. I would propose that the gesture of
recoil also helps the viewer read—contemplate from a distance—the horrific
representation. A considered, cognitive response is after all contingent on the
object’s readability (just as reason defines detection in mystery fiction). Relevant
to what can be described as Petersburg ’s baroque excess, or exuberance, is the
painting’s horrific disfigurement of a well-proportioned nude figure; its young
body stands in sharp contrast to the grotesque body of the father, especially to
his gaping, devouring mouth, an important source of disgust in the visual and
literary arts.
Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son (Prado Museum)
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 59

The statue of the cannibalistic god by the Italian sculptor Francesco Ca-
bianca (1716–17) at the Neva entrance of the Summer Garden (an important
setting in Petersburg) offers a horrific baroque image that very likely inspired Bely’s
representation of the mythical Chronos/Saturn, thematized as the time and
will to devour the next generation. Although the sculpture lacks the extreme ba-
roque excess of the Goya and remains unnamed in the novel, on close examina-
tion it inscribes precisely the kind of recoil that Bely self-consciously provokes.
The word in Russian that best characterizes the unformed organic detri-
tus produced by the bomb explosion and other acts of violence in Petersburg is
bezobrazie. Invoked on numerous occasions in the novel, the word designates
hideousness and deformity. Literally it means “without face” (bez obraza), sug-
gesting the lack of form. Bely comments on their affiliation in his memoir On the
Border of Two Centuries (Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii ) in describing mysticism as an
embrace by shapeless (bezóbraznymi ) and frequently disgusting (bezobráznymi )
physiological sensations.”11 Here is an example of both instances of bezobrazie in
a disturbing passage from Petersburg: “Totally red half of the wall: oozing red-
ness; the walls are wet, and therefore, sticky, sticky [. . .] to see [. . .] under one’s
feet the same dark red stickiness that splashed here after the loud sound; it
splashed from a hole with a scrap of torn-off skin . . . (but from which part of the
body?). Look up and find above me that it is sticking to the wall . . . Brrr! . . .
Lose consciousness at that point.”12
The passage, which inverts the murderous act in Goya’s and Cabianca’s
Saturns, depicts the patricidal fantasy of the son of Apollon Apollonovich
Ableukhov, the novel’s Saturn/Chronos figure. It represents the imagined
sundered body of the father in the form of blood oozing down his bedroom wall
with a shred of skin stuck on it. The image of blood flowing down a wall and
creating a puddle is the subject of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s famed October Idyll,
one of the pictures of his highly regarded urban Petersburg cycle, which refers
to the 1905 Revolution (see figure on page 102).
Representing reactionary political authority and Petersburg’s rational
geometry, the senator has been dissolved into “bloody ooze” in the son’s and
reader’s eyes. The reference to “the sticky walls” evokes Lippanchenko, from
lipkii (sticky), the most menacing father figure in the novel. Instead of the be-
loved geometric shapes that help Apollon (Russian for “Apollo”) maintain ra-
tional order in his life, we are confronted by the transformation of his body into
organic ooze. The image suggests the body’s unfinished and fluid aspect—its
imaginary transformation into a corpse—which is characteristic of baroque
aesthetics. The narrative engages us, together with the son, in a spatial perform-
ance of disgust. Like the son, who loses consciousness, we both avert our eyes
Francesco Cabianca, Saturn (Summer Garden) (photograph by Olga Matich)
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 61

from the representation of shapeless viscosity, which reminds us of our own

mortality and its degrading consequences, and also delight in the transgressive-
ness of the image. The distancing gesture, like the one we perform on seeing
Goya’s Saturn, helps us read the scene and express either moral revulsion or
aesthetic delight or a combination of both.
We perform a zigzag, so to speak: moving toward the image, then away
from it. Though different in meaning and function, structurally, or spatially,
the affective zigzag may be compared to the shifts from close-up to bird’s-eye
view in Bely’s modernist representation of the city of Petersburg, with the latter
signifying a panoptic perspective. In the affective sense, however, the novel re-
fers to the figure of the zigzag, a spatial image that inscribes recoil, to represent
fear and/or disgust on the one hand, and the will to readability and knowledge
on the other: for example, Nikolay traces a zigzag in a book to highlight an im-
portant passage. We encounter the zigzag for the first time when Dudkin slips
on the stairs as he tries not to drop the mysterious bundle; attempting to make
sense of the confrontation with him on the corner of Nevsky, from whom he
had recoiled in fear, the senator assigns Dudkin’s movement the threatening
zigzag gesture. Fear, like disgust, with which it is frequently aligned in the spec-
trum of aversive emotions, is typically associated with recoiling movement. It
is the senator’s desire to interpret the meaning of the zigzag that initiates his
investigation of the young terrorist. So the zigzag, which figures movement
toward and away from something—just like the prefix ot in otvrashchenie—is
intimately related to interpretation in the novel. An involuntary gesture, the
zigzag, like the emotion of disgust, is transformed into one that is cognitive, re-
vealing to us the attendant process of reading Bely and appreciating the experi-
ence. It adds an important spatial dimension to the act of interpretation, which
can be likened to the act of viewing a painting, both close-up and from a dis-
tance;13 or in the terms of Michel de Certeau’s practices of everyday urban life,
the street close-up is identified with unreadability, which he contrasts with the
panoramic view of the city, associating it with knowledge and conquest. This is
precisely what happens to the senator, who imagines seeing the city from a
panoramic perspective high above the city as he rides to work: he suddenly sees
the threatening gaze of Dudkin directed at him from the corner of Nevsky
Prospect; the spatial perspective shifts to a close-up from which he then recoils
in fear—after which he begins to try to make sense—that is, read—the terrify-
ing experience.
To return to Nikolay’s fantasy, however: instead of a moral response, the
patricidal desire gives rise to feelings of loathing about his own conception; he
remembers that he used to be called his father’s spawn, concluding that “man
62       

is slime sewn up in skin. [. . .] his [Nikolay’s] blood putrefied early. [. . .] this is

probably why he evoked disgust” (332).14 The ooze of birth and the ooze of
death become one in his mind as he conflates the opposition of birth and death,
contemplating the beginning of the life cycle (his own conception) and its end
(his father’s death) as equally viscous and disgusting.15 The attendant feeling of
shame, an affective kin of disgust, has more to do with the recollection, how-
ever, than with his patricidal fantasy. The look beneath the surface of the skin
at the body’s slimy interior suggests the unformed, morally and aesthetically
loathsome, aspect of life that slips effortlessly into death, a look that can be
aligned with aesthetically grotesque experience. Slime, located in between hard
surfaces and freely moving liquids, dissolves boundaries. Yet it is very much
present as a physical substance that occupies space, slowly expanding over its
surface and engulfing everything along its way. In the words of Robert Rawdon
Wilson, slime is “too appalling to contemplate, too compelling to ignore.”16 And
even though Nikolay’s memory stimulates a cognitive response, his conclusion
reveals that disgust is deeply lodged in the senses, arguably more so than any
other affect, because it always originates in the body, and in psychoanalytic
terms, in sexual anxiety and repression.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes slime—le visqueux—as an in-
between state, one that is amorphous and therefore aberrant, disgusting to con-
template because it represents the continuous threat of annihilation and noth-
ingness. Sartre affiliates the slimy with feminine nature and its sticky engulfing
essence, one that sucks everything into itself.17 In theoretical terms, slime—
its sticky, viscous formlessness—can be associated with category slippage, as I
suggest in chapter 1. It is a condition that produces not only visceral but also
cognitive disgust because it dissolves meaning, as evidenced by Lippanchenko,
certainly the slimiest character in the novel.18 He is slippery in more ways than
one: politically, he is a double agent who works for the revolutionaries and the
police; ontologically, he deprives Dudkin of meaning and faith in revolution;
physically, he is disgustingly repulsive. In aesthetic terms, however, the dissolu-
tion of form and the category slippage represent Bely’s modernist challenge to
traditional representation, which I will discuss in the next chapter.
Bely’s most startling evocations of disgust in conjunction with death are
those associated with the imaginary ingestion of food. Lippanchenko links death
and food directly in the deceptively innocuous comment “I am deathly hungry”
(281). They are linked by the image of a repulsive mouth whose most transgres-
sive activity is the consumption of human flesh, as in the Goya painting and the
Summer Garden sculpture. Lippanchenko, moreover, is the owner of the
novel’s most repulsively grotesque body, one that is in flux—or unformed. He is
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 63

variously a shadow, silhouette, persona (osoba), unshaped giant clod (besformen-

naia glyba), fatty back, and viscous organic slime—almost all of these are femi-
nine nouns, suggesting that like Sartre, Bely affiliates the disgusting with the fe-
male sphere. Dudkin associates Lippanchenko with the letter y, describing its
sound as “something dull and slimy” and coupling it with bezobrazie.
The owner of a repulsive mouth, Lippanchenko is also disgustingly edible:
“Lippanchenko’s lips resembled little pieces of sliced salmon—not yellowish
red, but oily and yellow (you have probably eaten such salmon with bliny in a
family of modest means)” (40). The reference to “you have eaten” insinuates
the reader into the act of eating Lippanchenko’s lips. His edibility is quickly
subverted, however, as his fatty whispering lips morph into rustling ant legs
on a dug-up anthill, reinforcing the essentially unfinished quality of his body.
These quick shifts that capture the unfixed aspect of Lippanchenko, contrib-
uting to his sinister presence in the novel and to the modernist spatialization of
the text, reflect Bely’s representational practice—one that inscribes recoil by
means of the zigzag.
The reference to his fishy lips links Lippanchenko to the sinister sardine tin
containing the bomb that he has prepared for the senator; in a grotesque asso-
ciation of eating and death, Nikolay imagines swallowing it despite his aversion
to the “yellow slime teeming with sardines.”19 As we read these passages with
fascination, we may experience the vomit reflex ourselves, and as we distance
ourselves squeamishly from the close-up, we also begin to make sense of the
images—a cognitive response, which is what Nikolay tries so hard to do
throughout the novel. The question that arises in this regard is whether the
readability of the image undermines its emotional impact. I would suggest that
it thickens our response by locating the cognitive moral layer of the initial vis-
ceral recoil.
The most startling representation of Lippanchenko’s edibility is Dudkin’s
cannibalistic fantasy of Lippanchenko as a suckling pig, an image that is first ar-
ticulated in Nikolay’s patricidal fantasy.20 According to Elias, “people, in the
course of the civilizing process, seek to suppress in themselves every character-
istic that they feel to be ‘animal.’ They likewise suppress such characteristics in
their food,” removing all traces of its animal origin.21 Bely does the exact oppo-
site in Petersburg.
Undressing Lippanchenko’s fatty shoulder and back in his mind’s eye,
Dudkin imagines that he could be carved as easily as the delectable dish, but
the transgressive culinary fantasy is interrupted by a cockroach, located outside
it, which makes him spit in disgust. The spitting gesture, which signals the
threshold of inside/outside, evacuates the desire quite literally. Saliva, like
64       

other body fluids when they leave the body, evokes disgust, marking Dudkin’s
threshold of repugnance in the scene. Next, the culinary fantasy of carving Lip-
panchenko produces a sense of horror in Dudkin: he visualizes his fatty neck as
a noseless, eyeless face (a literal instance of bezobrazie) with a torn, toothless
mouth. As in the instance of the salmon lips, the fantasy and its interruption by
vermin followed by the frightening metamorphosis represent the performative
zigzag function of disgust through close-up and distance: the fantasy performs
Dudkin’s desire to kill and eat Lippanchenko, but the subsequent images dis-
tance him from it. The reader, whose fascination and revulsion have been en-
gaged, participates in Dudkin’s gestural double play, and if this same reader
were to extend the experience to include a close-up view of the city inhabited
by Lippanchenko and Dudkin, the response would likely be similar. Such a
view of the city is discussed in the next chapter, although there the representa-
tion is considered through an aesthetic visual lens.
The narrative reifies the image of Lippanchenko as suckling pig in his ac-
tual slaughter by Dudkin (“this is how we slice the white hairless skin of cold
suckling pig in horseradish sauce” [386]).22 He seems to have overcome the
feeling of disgust, which according to William Ian Miller is an enervating emo-
tion, resulting in the loss of energy and resolve to action. Positioning the reader
directly on the threshold of repugnance, the narrative performs the slaughter as
if with culinary intentions but instead merely produces a corpse. Yet the asso-
ciation of Lippanchenko’s flesh with a delectable dish suggests coprophagy,
which ups the ante of the disgusting, despite the laughable scissors with which
the murder is performed. Even the sea near Lippanchenko’s dacha participates
in the murder and consumption of the body: the narrative refers to the waves
running up on the sand like thin blades and “licking” it, and then running back,
as if mimicking the recoiling movement of Lippanchenko’s body during the
slaughter and ours in response to it. As he touches the viscous liquid that drips
onto the sheet and falls abruptly on the bed, Lippanchenko realizes (on ponial )
that his back and stomach had been slit open, meaning once again that recoil
facilitates readability, not only for the reader, but for him as well.
The corpse as the emblem of the novel’s poetics engages its metamorphos-
ing representational practice, which inscribes organic decomposition. The next
day we see Dudkin sitting astride Lippanchenko’s corpse in a pool of blood,
one arm outstretched and a cockroach crawling on his lips and through his
nose, as if he were a corpse as well. The grotesque tableau suggests Falconet’s
Bronze Horseman, Petersburg’s genius loci, transformed into the site of a dying
and decaying city.23 Bely’s tableau figures the novel’s baroque sensibility, here
represented as the invasion of the city’s emblematic statue by vermin and
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 65

decay. The monument, a figure of classical aesthetic proportion, is turned into

one of baroque excess, with the horseman transformed into a figuration of
madness and physical putrefaction, both of which have invaded the city.24 Not
only is the body decomposed in Petersburg, but so is the city itself, as prophesied
by the Petersburg myth, and so is the Bronze Horseman, who leaves his pedes-
tal in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and gallops to Dudkin’s garret to flow into
his veins in metals.
The last name of Lippanchenko’s wife is Fleisch (“meat” in German),
which links the double agent and mastermind of the assassination plot to meat
from yet another perspective. Smelling the delicious roast that she is cooking in
the scene in which Dudkin sees Lippanchenko as a delectable dish, the latter
announces to everyone that he is famished: “I am deathly hungry . . .” The
comment and its context cement the attendant association of food and death,
prefiguring Lippanchenko’s slaughter.
How do we explain the culinary metaphor and the grotesque association of
food and death that inform both Nikolay’s and Dudkin’s murderous desires
and the role of Lippanchenko’s wife as cook, who, so to speak, offers up her
thoroughly repulsive husband as that delectable dish? One way to consider the
latter is in terms of the other male-female relationships in the novel, all of which
are unsuccessful, not to say repugnant. And how do we interpret Lippan-
chenko’s representation variously as a dangerous animal, as raw meat, and as
a delectable pork-and-salmon dish, figurations interspersed with images of
insects and vermin? Suggesting the ingestion of moral and physical decay, the
images remind us of our own mortality, from which we shrink away in disgust.
The insects and vermin connote moral and physiological putrefaction; they
herald the transformation of Lippanchenko’s body into a corpse, which will
ultimately metamorphose into viscous organic matter.25 Certainly, life in Bely’s
novel enacts the inexorable end of Petersburg as represented in the apocalyptic
myth of the Petersburg text; Bely’s images tap into a grotesquely baroque rep-
resentation of the dying city, one that stands in contrast to the traditional image
of classical Apollonian beauty and restraint. Green—green mists, green faces,
the germ-infested green waters of the Neva—is the color of decomposition and
disease in the novel.
Lippanchenko’s initial figuration in the novel is that of formless slime that
gets under Dudkin’s collar and oozes down his spine (see chapter 1 of this vol-
ume). According to Bely, man is but “a little glob of slime” pursued by primor-
dial chaos throughout history,26 suggesting that the body’s smooth exterior sur-
face is merely a cover for oozing matter, as if to invoke the baroque sensibility of
grotesque opposites: the suggestion is that the body is merely a deceptive surface
66       

and that man emerges from slime and returns to slime, that it erases the dis-
tinction between life and death, the most sacred cognitive, as well as existential,
opposites.
Next the image of Lippanchenko morphs into the adverb “suddenly,” the
temporal cornerstone of baroque aesthetics premised on surprise, which I dis-
cussed in the previous chapter. The narrator’s long disquisition on “suddenly”
emphasizes its animal nature, its ravenous appetite, which once again suggests
devouring, and ubiquitous presence. And once again, the narrator makes “you,
the reader” complicit in its loathsome activity. The nominalized adverb, which
has stuffed itself with the readers’ vile cerebral play, challenges the reader to
identify with his own disgusting animal nature.27 It reinforces the action gram-
matically, with the nominalized adverb instantiating the metamorphosis on the
level of language—by means of futurist sdvig (“displacement” or “shift”), a trope
that destabilizes traditional representation. The affiliation of “suddenly” with
Lippanchenko refers to a moment in time—a sudden feeling of revulsion—yet
one that acquires a loathsome spatial dimension. Moreover, the act of devour-
ing associated with “suddenly” evokes the novel’s figure of Saturn/Chronos.
The link between the adverb and Apollon Apollonovich as Saturn has been
established in the novel a few pages earlier; the question of who will devour
whom—the fathers, the sons; or vice versa—is essential to Petersburg. “Sud-
denly’s” narrative power, associated with Lippanchenko, and its metamorphic
power of conflating time and space mark the novelistic locus of the future
murderous act, about which the ticking time bomb reminds us periodically.
The figuration of Lippanchenko as slime under Dudkin’s collar and as
the image of dogs sniffing each other have other connotations as well. As I sug-
gested in the previous chapter, they insinuate a same-sex relationship between
the two conspirators, which Bely suppresses as loathsome and into which he in-
sinuates unmistakably homophobic feelings.28 We learn later that the young
revolutionary had participated in a loathsome “act” involving Lippanchenko
in Helsingfors, which resulted in the entrapment of Dudkin in the assassination
plot. Although Bely elided the meaning of the act from the final version of the
novel, a draft version explains that it involved “kissing the Goat’s ass and
stomping on the cross.”29 This mysterious act, referred to several times and
marked by italics in a key scene, is the hidden source of Dudkin’s despair.
Bely’s covert representation of same-sex desire as loathsome, or so I would
suggest, engages another aspect of disgust, one that concerns sexual difference.
Martha Nussbaum, who has examined the exclusionary function of disgust, fo-
cuses on the cultural and social politics of the emotion underlying racial preju-
dice, homophobia, and misogyny, all of which figure in Petersburg.30 Nussbaum
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 67

argues that disgust, contrary to the belief that it is a moral sentiment, is in fact
essentially “immoral” and should not only be contained but transcended.31
Needless to say, Bely, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, makes
no such claims, nor does he distinguish between the affect’s philosophically ex-
istential and socially exclusionary functions. An undifferentiated disgust defines
both the novel’s politics and its generalized sexual anxiety.
What is striking about all sexual references in Petersburg is that they inscribe
utter revulsion of the sort that a psychoanalytic reading of the novel would as-
sociate with deep-seated sexual anxiety: Nikolay, for instance, imagines his
own conception in the moment when his father is performing his “conjugal du-
ties” and experiences “familiar nausea with new power”; his father remembers
these duties in very similar terms.32 Nikolay’s nausea is of the same sort that
Sartre would later associate with existential angst and dissolution of meaning,
which both Nikolay and Dudkin identify with sexual desire.
A particularly vivid instance of the affiliation of death, food, viscosity, and
sex is one of the descriptions of Nevsky Prospect in which the crowd turns into
ooze, blurring all human boundaries. A variation on “What is this Russian em-
pire of ours?,” the parodic bureaucratic opening of the prologue, the later pas-
sage opens with “What is a fish egg?” and continues with a ridiculous disquisi-
tion on the equally ridiculous question in which Dudkin turns into a grain of
caviar—a fish egg—that is hurled into the sticky, oozing crowd, dissolving the
boundaries among its constituent members and resulting in the crowd’s, or
“human sediment’s,” unreadability:

What is a grain of caviar? It is both the world and object of consumption. As

an object of consumption, the grain does not represent a satisfactory whole;
caviar—is that whole: an aggregate of grains of caviar. The consumer does not
know caviar grains, but he does know caviar, that is, the sediment of grains
spread on an open-faced sandwich that is served. This is how the body of indi-
viduals rushing onto the pavement turns into a collective organic body on Nev-
sky Prospect [. . .]: the sidewalks of Nevsky become a sandwich field. The same
happened to the body of Dudkin, who flew here. (256)

Despite the comic parody of philosophical discourse, the disquisition in

midstream introduces edibility into the image of Nevsky’s “human sediment,”
offering a surreal image instead of one that can be read in familiar terms. Its
subtext once again suggests cannibalism: in the narrator’s imagination, the side-
walks morph into a delectable caviar sandwich; not just a single person becomes
edible, but so do all people walking on the avenue. And like Lippanchenko’s
salmon lips, the metaphor once again inscribes fishy organic matter—only this
68       

later image assumes gluttonous proportions, suggesting a comical, though

revolting, image of the end of Petersburg in an orgiastic meal, an image worthy
of Rabelais’s pen and of Bakhtin’s analysis.
Bely’s Petersburg is a dying city whose architectural beauty has been
invaded by putrefaction. In keeping with baroque aesthetics, the image jux-
taposes life and death, only to show their inexorable linkage: the fish eggs in-
sinuate conception and death into the simultaneously comical and disgusting
crowd on Nevsky. In the words of William Ian Miller, the author of The Anatomy
of Disgust, “the having lived and the living unite to make up the organic world of
generative rot—rank, smelling, and upsetting to the touch,” what he calls “life
soup, fecundity itself. [. . .] It is “slimy, slippery, wiggling, [. . .] generating
spontaneously. [. . .] Images of decay imperceptibly slide into images of fertility
and out again.”33 Miller’s description would have resonated profoundly with
the thinking of Solovyov and his followers, but not with Bakhtin, who writes
that in the culture of laughter, death represents the necessary joyful condition
for the renewal of life.
The image of Nevsky as a caviar sandwich, though comical, reminds us
that we are what we eat, not only in the sense of what we ingest, and not even
that we ingest the disgusting, but also that we ingest ourselves. The message is
that we appear in the world in the shape of a single sticky fish egg only to de-
vour ourselves collectively. The image evokes an earlier discussion of truth and
eating that parodies Pilate’s question “what is truth”; the answer is rendered by
means of a pun: istina—estina (the truth is what we eat), cannibalizing the truth.
The punning response is framed by people eating pork in a tavern and calling
each other pigs. The message is obvious: we eat pork and we are pigs. The pun
erases civilization’s desired distance between man and animal, with the close-
up uncovering man’s essential nature. Bely subverts the truth by identifying
it with eating, just as he degrades the human body, morphing it not only into
animal flesh but also into human food and thereby transgressing society’s most
sacred taboo. The result is a transgressive aesthetic challenge to the reader, es-
pecially to Bely’s contemporaries who had not yet been assaulted by violent,
sexually disturbing expressionist and surreal aesthetics.
Feelings of aversion have always been associated with the body’s orifices
(mouth, nose, ears, genitals, and anus) and with gaping wounds as artificial
orifices created violently. They have been considered dangerous openings
through which the outside world—in the form of disease and moral decay—
penetrates the physical and moral body and contaminates it.34 I have focused
primarily on the repulsive mouth as the orifice that ingests repulsive food. But
the mouth in Petersburg is also the path to the anus, the most unclean body part.
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 69

Apollon Apollonovich, who suffers from indigestion, spends a lot of time in the
toilet, the private space that links the ingestion of food with its expulsion. The
narrator refers to the toilet as that “incomparable place” which the senator con-
siders a place of refuge, locking himself in it after the bomb explosion, but not
only then. Pushing the threshold of repugnance, Bely has him defecate in bed
during a bout of diarrhea, described as a bathtub filled to the brim with stinking
excrement that the narrator compares to watery dung and a disgusting hippo-
potamus splashing in it. The comically grotesque comparison of the tiny sena-
tor to a large blubbery animal suggests the gargantuan size of the excrement.
The mouth and anus, however, are also linked to same-sex desire, which is
the hidden subtext of desire in the novel. I have already referred to the homo-
sexual underside of Dudkin’s relationship with Lippanchenko. His sidekick and
double agent Morkovin, a man with a gaping mouth and cannibalistic desire
(he brings his mouth up to Nikolay like a cannibal wanting to swallow him),
places a wet kiss on Nikolay’s lips in a smelly, sleazy restaurant, to which act the
latter responds with utter revulsion. What is striking about Bely’s deployment
of their mouths is that they are both animal-like and that they commingle eat-
ing and sex in a disgusting way.35
Dudkin’s most powerful experience of revulsion takes place during the
mysterious visit to his garret by the mysterious Shishnarfne, who reminds
Dudkin of the vile act in Helsingfors:
He would see himself [. . .] shouting intensely into absolute emptiness: [. . .] his
head was thrown back, the huge orifice of his screaming mouth would appear
to him as a black abyss. [. . .] “But then, after the act,” his mouth tore open
deafeningly, and closed. Suddenly, the curtain was rent before Alexander
Ivanovich’s eyes: he remembered everything clearly . . . That dream in Hel-
singfors [. . .] shouts were being cast out of him [. . .] and he understood:
“Shishnarfne.” [. . .] It was a familiar word, which he uttered as if he were per-
forming the act; only, this dreamily familiar word had to be turned inside out
[naiznanku]. And in a fit of uncontrollable fear, he tried to yell out: “Enfran-
shish.” [. . .] a voice that was shouting from his throat just before that shouted
threateningly: “Yes, yes, yes . . . It is me . . . I destroy irrevocably.” (298–99)

The biblical rent curtain, metaphorizing the way back into Dudkin’s
troubled memory, reduplicates the image of the torn mouth that opens onto a
dark abyss. He suddenly remembers that the word emanating from him during
the act was “Enfranshish,” the mysterious palindrome that he recognizes as
“Shishnarfne” turned inside out: naiznanku comes from iznanka, which means
“wrong, seamy side,” here perhaps also suggesting the backside. Later Dudkin
will tellingly refer to Shishnarfne as his iznanka. Characteristic of baroque
70       

poetry, palindromes, according to Paul Harris, “foreground the visual, mate-

rial and corporeal aspects of verbal signification” and represent reversibility in
the sense of reversing the flow of time, which “enacts the idea of transformation
and metamorphosis.” Quite remarkably, this description fits the encounter
between Dudkin and Shishnarfne/Enfranshish almost to a tee. In regard to the
eating and cannibalistic motifs in Bely’s novel, the contemporary German
palindrome poet Oskar Pastior describes irreversibility as “thematiz[ing] itself
in the palindrome form by eating itself up.”36
If we return to the idea that bodily orifices are considered openings through
which physical and moral dangers penetrate the body, Shishnarfne can be said
to represent them. One of the meanings of shish, the first and last reversible syl-
lable of Shishnarfne/Enfranshish, is the obscene gesture of the thumb between
the index and middle fingers. He is the link to the “vile act” that Dudkin per-
formed with Lippanchenko: the association of Dudkin’s lacerated, shouting
mouth with the baroque palindrome—a case of verbal inversion—insinuates
inverted desire.37 Putting the connection between them in anatomical terms,
the mouth is the beginning of a tube of which the anus is the end, or as Miller
writes, “the gate that protects the inviolability, the autonomy of males.”38 The
association may also shed light on the image of Lippanchenko as slime oozing
down Dudkin’s back.
And if we then return to the representation of Dudkin’s gaping mouth
during Shishnarfne’s visit once more, we should note that it also expresses an
emotion greater than disgust. The heartrending shout expresses shame as well
as profound existential angst,39 bringing to mind Edvard Munch’s famous
protoexpressionist painting The Scream (1895). Bely described his lecture “The
Tragedy of Dostoevsky’s Art” at the Religious Philosophical Society in 1910
as “a scream about my situation.”40 The same claim can be applied to his
groundbreaking novel.41 Like Dudkin’s shout, Munch’s painting figures anx-
iety that cannot be subdued. Here is how the painter depicted the origin of The
Scream:

I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of mel-
ancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the
railing, dead tired, and I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a
sword over the blue-black fiord and the city. My friends walked on. I stood there,
trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.42

If we place Bely’s drawing of Nikolay Apollonovich side by side especially with

the black-and-white lithograph version of Munch’s The Scream (1895), we are
struck by the similarity.43 Even though Nikolay’s mouth, described throughout
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895 (copyright 2009 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen
Group/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York)
Andrey Bely, Nikolay Apollonovich Ableu-
khov, 1910s (courtesy of the Andrey Bely
Museum, Moscow)
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 73

the novel as lacerated or gaping, is closed, his expressive serpentine form (his
body often assumes such a shape) and the thick pen strokes that serve as the
background are strikingly similar to those in the lithograph. Bely’s representa-
tion of the figure’s angst and the affect of the drawing evoke Munch’s expres-
sionist style.
I have not been able to ascertain whether Bely knew the painting or
Munch’s work, which was frequently exhibited at the beginning of the cen-
tury.44 In 1906 in Munich, he became acquainted with Stanislaw Przybyszew-
ski, one of Munch’s close friends and admirers, who collaborated on the first
monograph of the painter’s works (1894).45 Bely was well acquainted with
Przybyszewski’s fiction and wrote an essay about him, in which he described
the Polish writer’s tormented heroes roaring into chaos as well as their gaping
mouths.46 Przybyszewski inscribed Munch’s Scream into the first volume of his
novel Homo Sapiens, Overboard (Über Bord, which Bely knew), in which the painter
Mikita depicts a sunset as “thousands of mouths [that] hurled down molten
colours into space” as strips of congealed blood ranging from dark red and
purple to black. “Ugly, disgusting, but superb.”47 If not the painting, then this
passage could have been one of the sources of the ubiquitous shout and gaping
mouth in Petersburg—for instance, when Nikolay’s tormented mouth gapes at
the sunrise as it contemplates patricide, turning into a bloody red column that
dances in the air and then lands on the surrounding objects in the shape of
blood-red spots.
The only figuration of a shouting lacerated mouth in the novel that ex-
presses despair or pain exclusively is that of the noble caryatid, which is located
high above the crowd and whose shout is prophetic. Bely transforms the muscu-
lar, bearded caryatid, which supports the edifice of state, into an oracular image
as it rends its oral cavity by sounding the prophetic shout of coming destruction:

The muscular arms that flew up over the stone head would straighten out at the
elbows, and the chiseled sinciput would jerk wildly. The mouth would tear
open in a thunderous shout, a long desperate shout—the mouth would tear,
and you would say: “it is the roar of a tornado” (thousands of black caps of the
city hooligans shouted like this at the pogroms); the street would be drenched in
steam, like from the whistle of a locomotive; the cornice of the balcony that it
tore off from the wall would jump up above the street, and dissolve into hard,
loudly thundering stone. (265)

This instance of the lacerated mouth, by contrast, serves as an expression of

terror-inspiring prophecy. The shout of the despairing caryatid, which from its
dignified bird’s-eye view has long observed Petersburg’s immutable, ignorant,
74       

and unseemly human centipede below, announces physical destruction,

prophesying the whirlwind of revolution and of the end of Petersburg.
The mouth of Bely’s emphatically baroque caryatid also evokes the Hel-
lenistic Laocoön, beloved by the baroque, even though Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing claimed in his eponymous treatise on classical aesthetics that it ex-
presses pain and suffering nobly and does not transgress the classical “law of
beauty.” The Laocoön’s jaw is constricted, not open, according to Lessing and
therefore is not disgusting.48 In the modernist context, however, there is no
conflict between the expression of pain in a naturalistic vein, which we see in
the Laocoön, and aesthetic beauty, or in the shout that emanates from Bely’s
caryatid, which was proscribed by Lessing and classical aesthetics. The shout
that dissolves rational measured speech is a typical motif of baroque cum
modernist, especially expressionist, emotional excess. What made disgust the
subject of representation in baroque, romantic, and modernist aesthetics is its
morbidly alluring aspect. The excessive, not just the loathsome, is an important
locus of aesthetic representation in Petersburg, where the motif of the lacerated
and gaping mouth disfigured by pain and/or incoherent speech is aligned with
the sphere of baroque terror tempered by disgust, which represents the deca-
dent underbelly of the beautiful imperial city. Just like the novel’s Bronze Horse-
man, who in the end is linked to death and decay, the caryatid announces death
and destruction figured in baroque terms—by means of a lacerated gaping
mouth.49
So the image of the lacerated gaping mouth, in line with baroque, roman-
tic, and modernist aesthetics, is situated in the context of the higher truth and,
dare we say—the sublime, of which the disgusting functions as the underside.
The mouth serves this dual purpose: it is the conduit of prophetic and philo-
sophical language and because of its direct link to the digestive tract, the source
of revulsion. What seems to connect the sublime and disgust emotionally and
aesthetically is that they inspire terror: both reveal the reader’s or spectator’s
attraction to and recoil from terror as well as the sphere of grotesque represen-
tation. In this regard, the affiliation of the gaping mouth and gaping abyss
in Bely, which in classical Greek served as a reification of chaos from which
emerged the world, may also be an emanation of the sublime.
Bakhtin, however, offers a somewhat different view of the voracious gaping
mouth in his study of the grotesque body. He identifies it with the grotesque
face: “The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other
features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss.” The grotesque
body, inseparable from the rest of the world, is a body in the act of becoming,
continues Bakhtin: “it is never finished, never completed; it is continually built
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 75

[and] created”50—shapeless and formless, in other words. This can certainly

be ascribed to Bely’s figuration of Lippanchenko and the ghostly emanation of
Shishnarfne, and to his poetics more generally. Like subsequent theorists of dis-
gust, starting with Miller and Menninghaus, Bakhtin claims that the grotesque
body is characterized by its “apertures and convexities” and that it expands in
“copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, and
defecation,” revealing the body’s constantly changing state.51 The difference is
that the gaping mouth and grotesque body are positive, joyful concepts for
Bakhtin, as is the gaping abyss from which emerges the world, and that he affil-
iates the grotesque body with the culture of laughter.
References to Bakhtin notwithstanding, my reading of Petersburg has es-
chewed his concept of the grotesque, including the novel’s scathing dark satire,
as inextricably associated with laughter. Instead I have chosen to emphasize
the profoundly disturbing aspect of the novel’s affect by foregrounding the hor-
ror it evokes, which Bely links to the troubling dissolution of the boundaries
between life and death, especially by means of slime. It is oozingly spatial, a di-
mension that laughter lacks, even though like disgust, laughter is also premised
on the gesture of distancing the reader from an experience, frequently substi-
tuting mirth or a sense of irony for an emotional response.

O ne of the conclusions that may be drawn from my discussion of Petersburg is

that representation in it is utterly misanthropic. But is that really the novel’s
message? Most theorists of disgust have emphasized the affect’s normative
moral function, as well as its exclusionary connotations. It is undeniably protec-
tive and conservative: it polices the normative boundaries between life and
death, sublime and base, man and animal, self and other, male and female,
heterosexual and homosexual desire; in each pair, the disgust response validates
the first item against the second.52 It protects not only from baseness, contami-
nation, and our own mortality but also from the racial other, female danger,
and same-sex Eros as the self reassures itself “about its own solidity and power,”
writes Martha Nussbaum.53 She puts into question, however, the emotion’s
moral viability in instances when it expresses social, political, or cultural intoler-
ance. Most of these boundaries are under attack in Petersburg. The experience of
disgust in the case of Dudkin and Nikolay Apollonovich suggests a response to
their internalized moral boundaries: Dudkin feels shame and horror in regard
to the act, the repressed enfranshish; Nikolay imagines killing his father many
times, yet is horrified by his oedipal desire and sexual desire in general. Despite
marking moral boundaries around patricide, murder, and other forms of vio-
lence, disgust does not result in the reestablishment of moral order in the novel.
76       

Nor is it contained or surmounted in line with Nussbaum’s call to overcome the

kind of socially defined disgust that violates another’s self-definition.
If we regard disgust spatially, its movement toward and away from a shock-
ing and unsettling description reinforces Petersburg ’s spatial poetics: representa-
tion of a shocking close-up of the city, including its inhabitants and their emo-
tional experiences, on the one hand, and what Nikolay Antsiferov in The Soul of
Petersburg calls its panoramic general look from a bird’s-eye view on the other, a
vista that offers different images of the city: its palaces, parks, canals, and city
views of the Neva River.54 Just as the two visual perspectives of the city, in keep-
ing with de Certeau, represent illegibility in the case of the close-up and read-
ability in the case of the panoramic view, disgust becomes a cognitive sentiment
only after we have moved away (otvratili ) our gaze from the offensive experience.
The question that remains is whether Petersburg can be associated with
decadence, the ambiguous aesthetic sensibility of the turn of the century. It fa-
mously aestheticized the transgression or inversion of social and artistic norms
yet revealed a troubled view of sex. If we return to slime and its embodiment of
the transience of life, which characterized the baroque, the formless substance
symbolizes “life’s soup” from which new life is born. The self-conscious evoca-
tion of disgust in this regard reveals Bely’s own profound anxieties about sex
and its consequences. If we consider the deployment of disgust in Petersburg
from this perspective, we can compare it with some emendations to Freud’s
theory of the life and death instincts—Eros and Thanatos, which was most cer-
tainly tinged by the decadence. According to Freud’s later writing, the theory
consists of the struggle of Eros—a unifying, life-affirming principle—contra
Thanatos, which represents the instinctual desire to return to an original inor-
ganic state. Bely’s novel is about the victory of the death instinct, a decadent
view, but instead of an inorganic state, it is affiliated with the dissolution of the
body into oozing organic slime, which is utterly decadent. The dissolution of
Lippanchenko’s body in the end takes his novelistic life full circle by returning
it to the slime that oozes down Dudkin’s back at the beginning of the novel. It
brings to mind Solovyov’s idea of Eros and Thanatos—partners in the self-
perpetuating life cycle (the cause of death in life)—which was instrumental in
forming Bely’s views.
Petersburg succumbs fully to Thanatos in the decadent sense, not as the site
of the beautiful corpse but of its grotesque decay. Structurally, the novel is
premised on repetition at all of its levels—what in psychoanalysis is known as
the compulsion to repeat, which according to Freud governs the death instinct,
although I would suggest that it governs the procreative life instinct as well.
Petersburg represents the end of the Ableukhov line, whose parodic genealogy,
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 77

which repeats the generative impulse to procreate endlessly, is traced back to

Adam at the beginning of the novel. Quite obviously the termination of the
Ableukhov line has not abolished death, which still reigns in the epilogue, but it
no longer evokes revulsion. There are no disgusting close-ups; instead we con-
template from a distance the aging and death of Nikolay’s parents, his reading
of the Book of the Dead in North Africa, and his return to Russia to lead a solitary
life. We could conclude that the disgusting in death has been overcome since
there is no generative rot in the epilogue to reinvigorate procreative life and its
representation in a family novel, of which Petersburg is a modernist parody.
Like the baroque, late romanticism, and modernism, the novel intertwines
horror and disgust as they degrade the beautiful imperial city—its classical
order—and by extension those that live, eat, and die in it. Contrary to Peters-
burg’s architectural history, in which classical order triumphed over the ba-
roque, Bely’s novel marks the return, or revenge, of decadent baroque excess.
The novel dissolves traditional imagery by offering a disgusting yet stunning
vision of the end of the imperial city. Baroque writing also triumphs in the
novel’s epilogue, in which Nikolay is reading the eighteenth-century Ukrainian
mystic Grigory Skovoroda, the most important representative of the Ukrainian
baroque.55
This brings us back to the aesthetic function of disgust in the novel and
its will to undifferentiated, contingent slime. In the traditional idiom of Russian
symbolist criticism, disgust defies Apollonian restraint and fixity of aesthetic
boundaries, revealing Petersburg ’s Dionysian exuberance, which is symbolized
by the ticking bomb in the sardine tin and the slime it contains and produces.
But the deployment of the disgusting by Bely in his crowning novelistic achieve-
ment confronts the reader with more than disgust. It encourages the reader to
delight aesthetically in the loathsome and not avert her readerly gaze or resort
to laughter. This does not mean that the reader must elide an emotional re-
sponse; quite the contrary.
The ultimate challenge of Petersburg is to appreciate the ways it deploys
bezobrazie by pushing aesthetically the boundaries of the permissible, bound-
aries that lie beyond the novel’s rich musical and synesthetic structure and sym-
bolist poetics. The challenge is to recognize that it is the loathsome that informs
Bely’s unique experiment in modernist image-making: that the decomposition
of form, which the loathsome in the novel produces, is the animating source of
Petersburg ’s modernist will to abstract representation, which will be discussed in
the next chapter. Perhaps the aesthetic challenge of Petersburg is to stand in aes-
thetic awe of disgust—which is related to the sublime—and contemplate the
decomposing corpse as a source of abstraction in the novel. This may very well
78       

be Petersburg’s ultimate challenge. The suggestion may be more compelling if we

consider it in terms of Baudelaire’s famed “Carrion,” a profoundly decadent
poem that Bely references several times in his memoirs. It has been seen as
Baudelaire’s homage to the sublime in which art—as representation—triumphs
over nature.


A somewhat different version of this chapter appeared as “Poetics of Disgust: To Eat
and Die in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg” in the cluster “Emotional Turn? Feelings in Rus-
sian History and Culture,” Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009).
1. Describing his creative process in Arabeski in 1908, Bely compared it to bomb
throwing. See chapter 1, p. 39. Also see p. 116, n.25.
2. Discussing Petersburg and Bely’s writing in 1913, Alexander Blok writes that he
feels “disgust at [the fact that Bely] sees frightful filth” in everything (“Dnevnik 1913
goda,” Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 7, ed. Vladimir Orlov [ Moscow: Khudo-
zhestvennaia literatura, 1963], 223–24).
3. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Litera-
ture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 220.
4. Andrey Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934),
8. Strikingly, Bely’s book about Gogol is written as if he were analyzing his own literary
production.
5. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Black-
well, 2000), 51.
6. See the following for a theoretical discussion of the aesthetics of disgust: William
Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997);
Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard
Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), originally published
as Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999); Robert
Rawdon Wilson, The Hydra’s Tale: Imagining Disgust (Edmonton: University of Alberta
Press, 2002); Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2005).
7. Menninghaus, Disgust, 1.
8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3–4.
9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), 407.
10. The figure of Chronos/Saturn defines the relationship between father and son.
Much has been written about the mythological and theosophic meaning of this god in
Petersburg, yet I consider him in relation to the oral sphere. Apollon Apollonovich, the
Chronos/Saturn figure in the novel, is also associated with the devouring tarantula by
both Nikolay and Dudkin, and with the Gorgon Medusa.
11. Andrey Bely, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhe-
stvennaia literatura, 1989), 186–87.
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 79

12. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 329–30.
Subsequent page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text and
notes.
13. See my reading of the same scene in chapter 1, where I discuss the gaze in rela-
tion to the close-up/far-off view.
14. Cf. Kafka’s expression of disgust at his own conception. In a letter he writes that
the sight of the bed where he was conceived “can turn his stomach inside out,” as if he
were “indissolubly connected with these repulsive things; something still clings to the
feet as they try to break free, held fast as they are in the primordial slime” (Franz Kafka,
Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth [ New York: Schocken,
1973], 525, quoted in Menninghaus, Disgust, 243–44).
15. “Where death is, there is also birth, change, renewal. The image of birth is no
less ambivalent; it represents the body that is born and at the same time shows the image
of the departing one” (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 409).
16. Wilson, The Hydra’s Tale, 66.
17. Lippanchenko is associated with the sucking gesture: like an infant he sucks in
air as if it were milk from a bottle, and by extension, he sucks in his collaborators.
18. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology,
trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 772–78.
19. Cf. Bely’s representation of Mayakovsky’s expressive hyperbolic poetry: “The
poem War and Peace is a hyperbole that gapes its snout at Gogol’s hyperbole, having
swallowed it to grow fat from its juices and then release them into the juicy plumbing of
the arteries: ‘rusty viscous liquid was oozing in the plumbing’; ‘continents hang like car-
casses on bayonets’” (Andrey Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia, 312).
20. We are told earlier that Lippanchenko wanted to export Russian pigs abroad
with the purpose of getting rich. In an earlier patricidal fantasy, which is accompanied
by feelings of nausea, the narrator and Nikolay imagine plunging a knife into his father:
“this is how a suckling pig in aspic and horseradish sauce is carved” (221), which is the
first instance of this astonishing culinary figuration of death in the novel.
21. Elias, Civilizing Process,120.
22. Earlier in the novel, the narrator offers a cannibalistic image of his own: he
compares Lippanchenko to a bloody, skinned carcass with a gaping snout hanging in a
butcher shop (282). Like in Dudkin’s fantasy of carving Lippanchenko’s cooked body,
the image of slaughter (resulting in a skinned carcass) is insinuated into the narrator’s
fantasy; the narrator, like Dudkin, also subverts Lippanchenko’s edibility: the surreal
carcass appropriates the power of the gaze and confronts us with its bloody meat, which
has assumed the shape of a gaping snout. (Notably, elsewhere in the novel, the city’s
slaughterhouse and its butchers make an episodic appearance. See Mieka Erley’s essay
on the slaughterhouse in this volume.)
23. The symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius offers a similar vision of the metropolis in
her 1909 poem “Petersburg,” which ends with the image of maggots feeding on the
city’s backbone: “I cherv’ bolotnyi, cherv’ upornyi / Iz’’est tvoi kamennyi kostiak” [And
the swamp maggot, the persistent maggot / Will eat away your stone skeleton] (Z. N.
Gippius, “Peterburg,” Stikhotvoreniia, ed. A. V. Lavrov, in Novaia biblioteka poeta [St. Peters-
burg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999], 143). The Petersburg in the poem is the locus of
decay, stench of corpses, and indelible red spots of blood (see chapter 3 on spots).
80       

24. The sculptor Falconet, whose work was influenced by the baroque, created an
equestrian statue in the neoclassical style, but as Alexander Schenker writes, the repre-
sentation of the horse rearing on its hind legs reflects “baroque restlessness,” as does the
“fluid wave-like shape of the pedestal” (Alexander M. Schenker, The Bronze Horseman:
Falconet’s Monument to Peter the Great [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003], 265).
25. For a discussion of the natural cycle and the transcendence of its inexorable in-
scription of death in Vladimir Solovyov’s erotic utopia, see Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia:
The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2005), 59–61 and 74–77.
26. Quoted in Magnus Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj’s Novel
“Peterburg,” Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 15 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell,
1982), 27.
27. For further discussion of “suddenly” and “cerebral play,” see chapter 1.
28. To my knowledge, the first scholar to consider the homosexual subtext of the
Dudkin-Lippanchenko relationship is Magnus Ljunggren in The Dream of Rebirth. In
contrast to Bely’s homophobia, there are also positive coeval representations of same-
sex love in Russian literature, e.g., in Mikhail Kuzmin’s Wings (Kryl’ya, 1906). Bely origi-
nally wrote a negative review of the novel (“‘Kryl’ya Kuzmina,” Pereval 6 [1907]: 50–51),
although he changed his opinion of it later.
29. See the commentary by S. S. Grechishkin, L. K. Dolgopolov, and A. V. Lavrov
to Peterburg, 676n41.
30. E.g., it is suggested that Lippanchenko is a Jew; the representation of Sofia
Petrovna can certainly be described as misogynist.
31. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity. According to Nussbaum, instead of furthering
the civilizing process, disgust frequently does the opposite: it undermines the values of
liberal society. While much less concerned with its illiberal function, Miller attributes a
similar exclusionary function to disgust. Aurel Kolnai, the first modern thinker to con-
sider the emotion in philosophical and theoretical terms, had already written in 1929
that in certain instances disgust “stands, one might say, in irregular service of the
morally good” (Aurel Kolnai, Carolyn Korsemaeyer, and Barry Smith, On Disgust [Chi-
cago: Open Court Publishing, 2004], 81).
32. Cf. Apollon Apollonovich’s memory of his wedding night: “an expression of dis-
gust, disdain, masked by a submissive smile. That night Apollon Apollonovich, already
a state councilor, committed the vile act sanctioned by set form: he raped the young
woman. The rape went on for years, and one of those nights Nikolay Apollonovich was
conceived—between two different kinds of smiles, of lechery and of submission. Was it
surprising then that Nikolay Apollonovich was as a result a composite of disgust, fear,
and lechery?” (362).
33. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 40–41.
34. Petersburg makes reference to the pollution of the Neva by green bacilli.
35. “Nikolay Apollonovich stood in the billowing white clouds of stench from the
kitchen, pale, white, and crazed, his red mouth agape, but not laughing, with a halo of
very light, fog-like linen hair—a hunted animal, he bared his teeth and turned to Morko-
vin” (212). The gape, which is here framed by stench—of food and by association of a de-
caying corpse—morphs into an image of bared teeth, which reveals Nikolay’s animal na-
ture. Before the kiss, Morkovin brings his “open oral cavity up to Nikolay Apollonovich
P o et ic s o f D isg u st 81

like a cannibal who was going to swallow Ableukhov” (203–4). What we see are two dis-
gusting oral cavities facing each other in a scene that is permeated by disgusting animal
imagery.
The most repulsive depiction of Lippanchenko’s mouth is Dudkin’s already refer-
enced surreal fantasy: “Suddenly a fatty neck fold bulged out between the back and
back of the neck in a giant smile [. . .] and the neck acquired the appearance of a face, as
if a monster with a noseless, eyeless snout was sitting in the chair; and the neck fold ac-
quired the appearance of a toothless torn mouth,” to which Dudkin’s response is one of
recoil (277). The image of the torn mouth—simultaneously mouth and wound—has, as
mentioned earlier, been displaced onto Lippanchenko’s fatty back.
36. Paul Harris, “Nothing: A User’s Manual,” SubStance 35, no. 2 (2006): 11–12.
Harris identifies the palindrome, a self-consuming poetic figure whose action represents
movement back and forth, with the Gnostic Ouroboros, the image of a snake biting its
own tail, an image that appears in Petersburg early on in one of the senator’s out-of-body
experiences.
37. We get our first inkling of Dudkin’s homosexual desire during his first meeting
with Nikolay, when the former tells him that he has never been in love with women and
that since Helsingfors, he has lusted after fetish objects: women’s body parts and parts of
clothing, like stockings. He also tells Nikolay that men have been in love with him,
which Ableukhov interprets to mean Lippanchenko. In other words, Dudkin represents
himself as a fetishist, which at the turn of the twentieth century was affiliated with same-
sex desire. In his conversation with Shishnarfne, he speaks about ritual fetishism, espe-
cially in Satanist cults, suggesting once again the suppressed reference to kissing the
goat’s ass and stomping on the cross.
38. Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 98–100.
39. Similar feelings are evoked by Dudkin’s morphing grotesque body in the subse-
quent scene in which the Bronze Horseman pours into Dudkin’s veins. Like other char-
acters in the novel, the Bronze Horseman is a metamorphic figure that changes shape
and assumes different forms.
40. Ljunggren, Dream of Rebirth, 14. Here is how Munch described the painting:
“you know my picture, The Scream? I was being stretched to the limit—nature was
screaming in my blood—I was at a breaking point,” quoted in Sue Prideaux, Edvard
Munch: Behind the Scream (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 152.
41. It is a commonplace of Petersburg criticism that the image of Sofia Petrovna
Likhutina and Nikolay’s romantic involvement with her is Bely’s parodic representation
of his obsessive love for Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, Alexander Blok’s wife, and of
their troubled relationship.
42. Vanessa Rumble, “The Scandinavian Conscience: Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and
Munch,” in Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression, ed. Jeffery Howe (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2001), 27. In The Philosophy of Art, Schopenhauer claims that art
was not able to reproduce a scream successfully; Bely proved him wrong as did Munch
by using symbolist synesthesia (fusion of light, color, sound, and rhythm).
43. N. A. Kaydalova has perceptively noted that Nikolay’s head resembles Kon-
stantin Somov’s well-known, 1907 portrait of Blok (N. A. Kaydalova, “Risunki Andreia
Belogo,” in Andrey Bely: Problemy tvorchestva [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988], 599).
44. The Scream has been exhibited at Oslo’s National Gallery since 1909. Bely
82       

traveled to Norway twice: in 1913 to attend Rudolf Steiner’s lectures and in 1916, stop-
ping there only briefly.
45. In 1906, Bely frequented Café Simplicissimus in Munich—a gathering place of
the Secession artists, with whom Munch was affiliated.
46. Andrey Bely, “Prorok bezlichiia,” Arabeski, in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma,
ed. A. L. Kazin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 2:10–21.
47. Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Overboard, in Homo Sapiens: A Novel in Three Parts, trans.
Thomas Seltzer (New York: Knopf, 1915), 21. Homo Sapiens was very popular in Russia.
48. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,
ed. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 7–8.
49. Bely deployed this image in his writing elsewhere as well. “A large as if lacer-
ated mouth with a protruding lip” is how he represents Vladmir Solovyov’s mouth in
Arabeski (1911). Besides evoking revulsion, Solovyov’s mouth, as described by Bely, is
oracular (like that of the caryatid): it gives birth to “the words of a prophet” (“O Vla-
dimire Solovyove,” in Arabeski, 350). Bely depicts the Russian philosopher Nikolay
Berdyaev in similar terms, framing his philosophical discourse by the disgusting rep-
resentation of a violent seizure of the oral cavity (a torn gaping mouth), a facial tic that
Berdyaev suffered (Andrey Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov [ Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990], 416). I remember my grandfather, who had
known Berdyaev, performing the philosopher’s nervous tic at the dinner table. The rest
of us would invariably watch with fascination, especially my brother and I, and then
proceed to express our disgust with my grandfather’s bad table manners. “At the table?
Really! How disgusting!”
50. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 317.
51. Ibid., 321. Cf. also George Bataille’s essay “Mouth,” in which the orifice is
described in terms similar to Bakhtin’s but with the addition of surreal excess (George
Bataille, “Mouth,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 [ Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1996], 59–60).
52. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 625.
53. Ibid., 204.
54. Nikolay Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga (Leningrad: Agentstvo “Lira,” 1990), 176.
For a discussion of Antsiferov’s approach to the city, see the introduction to this volume.
55. In all likelihood it was not the baroque aspect of Skovoroda’s writing but his
Slavophile stance that attracted Bely, although the former may have had some sig-
nificance too. See A. V. Lavrov, “Andrey Bely i Grigory Skovoroda,” in Andrey Bely:
Razyskaniia i etiudy (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), 157–71.
 3
Bely, Kandinsky, and
Avant-Garde Aesthetics
    

The visual metaphors, verbal tableaus, sonority, poetic rhythms, and sym-
phonic structure of Petersburg suggest the term Gesamtkunstwerk, as does the
novel’s synthetic and synesthetic approach to language, music, and the visual
arts. Yet Bely scholarship has considered Petersburg almost exclusively in rela-
tion to music, most likely because symbolist aesthetics, about which Bely wrote
extensively during the 1900s, professed Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s view of
music as the highest art form.1 In the 1910s a new aesthetic vision—futurism—
emerged in Russia, and even though Bely never affiliated himself with the
futurists, Petersburg reveals remarkable affinity to the new sensibility. The only
contemporary reading of Petersburg that considered its avant-garde aesthetics
was by Nikolay Berdyaev, who described the novel as cubist and compared it to
Picasso’s visual practice.2 Bely himself would later describe his novel as a mon-
umental painting of which he had completed only one corner.3
Robert Alter writes that “Petersburg is an acutely visual novel, and so its per-
vading sense of sudden disruption in the modern city is repeatedly translated into
arresting visual imagery,” without, however, developing the claim.4 If we read
Petersburg through a visual lens, we are struck by Bely’s imaginative translation
into language of occult geometry and of postimpressionist antinaturalistic, and
even abstract, representation. In all likelihood, critics have virtually neglected
the visual aspect of Bely’s writing, despite his avant-garde—expressionist cum
futurist—writerly practice that started around 1910, because he continued to

83
84       

identify with symbolism and had little to say about the visual arts, unlike about
music, and because his rare comments about avant-garde painters were often
negative.5 Yet the novel reveals an affinity for coeval modernist painting in its
startlingly expressive juxtapositions and metamorphic imagery, creating what
Joseph Frank describes as “spatial form in modern literature.” According to
Frank, modernist writers “intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially,
in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence.”6 He writes that they accom-
plish this by means of juxtaposition, movement back and forth that subverts
development in time, and the creation of a palimpsest structure. If chapter 1
demonstrated Petersburg ’s futurist and cubist deployment of juxtaposition and
metamorphic imagery, the focus here is expressionist aesthetics.
My search for Bely’s symbolist and postsymbolist counterpart in the visual
arts has evinced Wassily Kandinsky, with whom Bely shared a similar mystical,
as well as aesthetic, vision, writing about the arts in comparable terms as Kan-
dinsky. While the cubists in France and cubo-futurists in Russia reconfigured
the symbolist hierarchical relation of the arts, substituting painting for music,
Kandinsky, like Bely, maintained a symbolist focus on music and synesthesia,
especially on the relationship of color and sound. Moreover, Petersburg ’s im-
agery resonates powerfully with coeval expressionism (which is most famously
associated with Kandinsky), even more so, I would suggest, than with cubism.7
A particularly striking correspondence of Kandinsky and Bely is their rec-
ollection of one of Monet’s famous Haystacks that they saw at a French impres-
sionist exhibit in Moscow during the 1890s.8 Kandinsky wrote his response to
the painting in Reminiscences (Rückblicke) in 1913:
Previously, I had known only Realistic art [. . .] suddenly, for the first time, I
saw a picture. That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t rec-
ognize it. I found this nonrecognition painful, and thought that the painter had
no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a dull feeling that the object was lacking
in this picture. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not
only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably upon my memory [. . .] the
unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, [. . .] ex-
ceeded all my dreams. [. . .] albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an
essential element within the picture. I had the overall impression that a tiny
fragment of my fairy-tale Moscow already existed on canvas.9

Bely wrote about seeing the Monet in 1891 in his memoir On the Border of Two
Centuries (Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii ) only in 1930:
Mother took me and mademoiselle to the French exhibit very often. [. . .] I was
surprised by that which Moscow found so funny: the French impressionists
(Degas, Monet, etc.). [. . .] stopping in front of the pleasing colorful spot [my
emphasis], the disgraceful “haystack” that had caused such a sensation, I would
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 85

get very upset that I couldn’t share mother’s and mademoiselle’s outrage; to tell
the truth, I liked that the French impressionists’ colors ran into my eyes, but I
concealed my impression and remembered it; [. . .] the “strangeness” seemed
familiar; as if it hinted at something which I came to know earlier; and I re-
membered my very first experiences of consciousness on the border between
my second and third year (could it be that I saw objects that way then?).10

Bely was only eleven in 1891; Kandinsky was more than ten years older.
Despite the difference in age, they were both struck by the Haystack’s novelty,
which left a lasting impression. Each in his own way was unsettled by the paint-
ing: the older Kandinsky was disconcerted by his ignorance—that he didn’t
recognize the subject of the painting and only learned it from the catalogue;
Bely, by his inability to align his response with that of the adults, although his
dismay seems tongue-in-cheek.
Kandinsky links the recollection directly to his future experiments in color
and dissolution of the material object. Even though on first sight Bely’s re-
sponse seems playful and childlike, it refers to his future concerns as well: rep-
resentation of the consciousness of early childhood and the dissolution of tradi-
tional form, which, in the recollection, he affiliates with the vibrating blurring
of colors. Describing himself at the turn of the third year in the same memoir,
Bely writes of his extraordinarily vivid memories of a bout of scarlet fever and
consequent delirium and the later realization that the fragmentary, flowing,
and hallucinatory form of these memories marked the starting point of his sym-
bolist vision and what he calls “my genealogy.”11 The reference to the turn of
the third year punctuates the broader meaning of “on the border,” which he
calls “scissors,” and is reinforced by the title of the memoir On the Border of Two
Centuries. Bely perceived the haystack as a “spot” ( piatno), a counterpart to
Kandinsky’s view of the haystack as discrediting the object and to his descrip-
tion of Moscow at sunset in the same memoir a few pages earlier as dissolving
into “a single spot” (R 360).12 The image would later travel to his abstract
paintings, including their titles: Landscape with Red Spots, Painting with a Red Spot,
Three Black Spots, Painting with Three Spots. As in Kandinsky’s work, spots figure
prominently in Petersburg, with at least seventy-five references.
The correspondences do not end here: Kandinsky studied and worked in
the sphere of economics and law before he changed professions in 1896 to go
to Munich and study painting;13 Bely would study the natural sciences and
mathematics, abandoning them first for philology and history and subsequently
for a literary profession. Kandinsky lived in Munich with some interruptions
between 1896 and 1914, when he returned to Russia for several years; Bely lived
in Munich during October and November 1906, visiting his high school artist
friend Vasily V. Vladimirov, who was studying painting in Munich.14 There
86       

Bely frequented Café Simplicissimus, a bohemian gathering place, which

Kandinsky used to visit as well. Both men became interested in theosophy and
anthroposophy about the same time and attended Rudolf Steiner’s lectures
and read his books. Kandinsky’s copy of Theosophy, by Steiner, and issues of
Lucifer-Gnosis contained many notes in the margins. Kandinsky heard his lec-
tures first (in Berlin in 1908), even though it was Bely who became a true adept
and devoted several years of his life to Steiner’s anthroposophic doctrine.15
Kandinsky had an affinity for the symbolist Blue Rose artists, as did Bely, some
of whom he knew personally.16 In 1912 the German reviewer for Apollon, in
which both men published, called Kandinsky the proponent of a new art, writ-
ing that he had abandoned content and nature in his search for “new forms of
expression,”17 which was also Bely’s obsession while writing Petersburg. Both
were inspired by Alexander Scriabin’s synesthetic experiments, but Kandinsky
quickly moved on to Arnold Schönberg’s far more radical experiments in syn-
esthesia and musical dissonance. Needless to say, Kandinsky and Bely were
devotees of Wagner, who introduced the term Gesamtkunstwerk, and of Nietz-
sche; they had apocalyptic presentiments, like their Russian contemporaries
and forebears; they viewed Isadora Duncan’s dance as an exemplar of synes-
thesia and new movement; and so on.
Yet it appears that the two never met.18 To my knowledge, Kandinsky
made no references to Bely, although he must have read Bely’s essays from the
1900s on symbolism,19 especially since he was very much influenced by the
symbolist movement in the arts: he published a review of the Munich art scene
in World of Art (Mir iskusstva) in 1902, the same year in which Bely published his
first article on aesthetics, titled “Forms of Art” (“Formy iskusstva”), in the very
same journal.20
My purpose, however, is not the question of influence but the cultural and
aesthetic affinities of their theoretical writing and artistic production: the ways
they represented the disintegrating and exploding cosmos; experimented with
color, sound, and abstraction; and reduced naturalistic representation to
points, lines, and spots.

S pl i t t ing t he At om / Bomb Ex pl o s i o n

It is a commonplace of art history that the splitting of the atom informed the
revolution in modernist and avant-garde aesthetics. The nuclear fission served
as one of the key subtexts of contemporary painting and literature, which was
typically rendered in the form of explosion, with movement emanating from
the center to the peripheries. Here is what Kandinsky wrote about it in 1913:
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 87

A scientific event removed one of the most important obstacles from my

path. This was the further division of the atom. The collapse of the atom was
equated, in my soul, with the disintegration of the whole world. Suddenly the
stoutest walls crumbled. Everything became uncertain, precarious and insub-
stantial. I would not have been surprised had a stone dissolved into thin air be-
fore my eyes and become invisible. Science seemed destroyed. (R 364)

A student of mathematics and the natural sciences, Bely was knowledge-

able about contemporary theories of physics. In the retrospective poem First
Meeting (Pervoe svidanie, 1921), he offered a striking image of the splitting of the
atom, describing it anachronistically as an explosion of the atomic bomb and
embedding it in his own scientific studies at the university, as well as in his read-
ing of Nietzsche:

[That playful explosions

Hide Thomson’s whirlwinds,
And that huge worlds
Haven’t been silenced by atomic power,
That thought, like dynamite, flies
Courageously and quickly,
That a new experiment . . .

—“The world will fly!”—

Said Friedrich Nietzsche while exploding . . .

The world exploded in Curie’s experiments

Like a bursting atomic bomb
Into electronic streams
Like a disembodied hecatomb.]
88       

As I wrote in chapter 1, Bely had already compared his writing to a bomb

in 1908, referring to Nietzsche’s claim in Ecce Homo that he is not a man but dy-
namite: “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—splashes of shards, two rows
of intersecting continuities; the shards of my work are the forms of art; shards of
the seen—images of necessity that explode my life.”22
The bomb became an important metaphor of writing at the turn of the
twentieth century, in part as a result of the highly publicized anarchist bomb
throwing in the capitals of Europe, especially in Russia. In response to the
bombing of the French National Assembly by Auguste Vaillant in 1893, Sté-
phane Mallarmé was supposed to have said: “I know of no other bomb but a
book. [. . .] I do not think one can use a more effective weapon than litera-
ture.”23 The metaphor of the bomb continued into the avant-garde—in Russia
in the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, for instance.24 Consider also the futur-
ist example that I cited in chapter 1: Alexei Kruchyonykh’s book of poetry Ex-
plosivity (Vzorval’, 1913) and Olga Rozanova’s abstract representation of it on the
cover (see p. 41).
The bomb pervades Bely’s writing, especially Petersburg, in which, as we
know, it drives the plot, subtending the novel’s disjunctive, fragmentary struc-
ture, shrapnel-like geometric imagery, synecdochal representation of the body,
and the expansion of consciousness.25 As I show in chapter 1, the image of the
exploding bomb as multiple radiating lines from the center was also repre-
sented in the cartoon genre in the popular press, especially in the satirical jour-
nals that mushroomed after the 1905 Revolution in response to the eased cen-
sorship (see p. 102). Another example of the image is the cover of Shtyk (Bayonet ),
edited by the well-know humorist Arkady Averchenko in Kharkov (1906–7).
The caption by I. F. Gorbunov from Balloonist (Vozdukhoplavatel’ ) reads: “you
can’t fly from the good life” (ot khoroshei zhizni ne poletish’ ).
More specifically for the comparison of Kandinsky and Bely, the bomb
trope motivates Petersburg’s dissolution of form, which I discussed in relation to
affect in the previous chapter. Even though Kandinsky’s writing and paintings
apparently have no bomb images, he describes “painting [as] a thundering col-
lision of different worlds [and as cosmic catastrophes] that were destined in and
through conflict to create the new world called the work” (R 373). Explosion in
Petersburg is steeped in the terrorist bomb throwing rampant in Russia at the be-
ginning of the century (“bombs striking bombs, splashes of shards”), yet the
novel’s larger meaning and its multiple red spots refer not only to urban vio-
lence but also to cosmic collision, so that Kandinsky’s description of painting
could be said to characterize Bely’s novel just as persuasively.
Cover of Shtyk, a satirical journal, 1905 (courtesy of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, Los
Angeles)
90       

Apo caly p se, Theosophy, a nd An t hr o po s o p hy

It is another commonplace that the turn of the twentieth century in Russia was
associated with powerful apocalyptic presentiments. The emblematic bomb in
Petersburg has been read not only in relation to urban terrorism but also to Bely’s
obsession with the apocalypse in Revelation, as has Kandinsky’s move to abstrac-
tion; Revelation’s images and tableaus are after all profoundly abstract. Both of
their apocalyptic expectations were inspired by the Russian philosopher Vladi-
mir Solovyov and by theosophy and anthroposophy.26 Expressing his apoca-
lyptic presentiments, Kandinsky writes in On the Spiritual in Art, his most impor-
tant theoretical essay on aesthetics, that the new art marks the “coming Epoch
of the Great Spiritual.” Like Bely, he read the theosophists Mme. Blavatsky,
Annie Besant, and Charles Leadbeater and the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner,
all of whom inscribed an apocalyptic spirituality. And like Mondrian and other
artists experimenting with abstraction, Kandinsky and Bely were greatly influ-
enced in their thinking and aesthetic sensibilities by the theosophist cum
anthroposophist notion of the dematerialization of matter.
Among Kandinsky’s and Bely’s favorite apocalyptic images were the
galloping horseman (rendered in Petersburg as the Bronze Horseman and the
Asiatic horde) and angel, which they represented in manifestly similar ways:
Kandinsky in a glass painting (1911); Bely in a drawing that he made in the
anthroposophic commune in Dornach between 1912 and 1916 with the purpose
of visualizing his spiritual meditation and communicating his experience to
Steiner. Kandinsky’s angels are well known; Bely’s, which verge on abstrac-
tion, are not.27
Consider especially the similar figuration of the head of the angel: the stern
face, which resembles Orthodox iconography, and the flowing hair, whose tex-
ture and movement extend to the wings. Bely’s angel is almost more abstract
than Kandinsky’s, focusing as it does on swirling, spiraling motion.28 The head
and hair of the angel are the source of explosive, dissolving movement in Bely’s
drawing; they are the point from which the drawing’s single swirling motion
emanates, evoking the famed first description of Petersburg in the novel, in
which the city is described as a point on a map from which “surges and swirls
the printed book.”29 The drawing depicts revelation as a single explosion that
bursts from the angel’s head and then surges outward from the center, as does
“cerebral play” from the head of the senator in Petersburg. Kandinsky, in com-
parison to whom Bely is of course a mere novice in painting, though a talented
one, renders motion by means of thick black lines and different pictorial planes
moving diagonally in more than one direction.
Wassily Kandinsky, The Last Judgment, 1911 (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; copyright
2009 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)
92       

Andrey Bely, Angel, 1910s (Rudolf Steiner Archive)

But let us return to the passage “My creative work is a bomb that I
throw; [. . .] splashes of shards, [. . .] the shards of my work are the forms of art;
shards of the seen—images of necessity [my emphasis] that explode my life,” and
let us focus this time on the effect of the metaphoric bomb on aesthetic form.
Emphasizing his role as the artistic agent, Bely compares his writing to the im-
pact of an exploding bomb thrown both at the world and reflexively back at
himself: the explosion produces what he calls images of necessity (obrazy neobkhodi-
mosti ). It resembles Georg Simmel’s famed description of the urban metropolis
as a rapidly telescoping and fluid relationship of the inner and outer worlds
produced by modernity’s violent stimuli (see introduction to this volume, p. 5).
The images of necessity, according to Bely, are fragments of the seen, as if to
suggest that they are the products of an urgent inner voice that explodes reality.
Despite the violence, Bely’s description of his aesthetic process may be
viewed as an analogue to Kandinsky’s creative principle of inner or internal neces-
sity (innere Notwendigkeit ), which he introduced in On the Spiritual in Art (1911); the
first reference to it appeared in Russian in Odessa (1910): “The principle of
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 93

internal necessity [vnutrenniaia neobkhodimost’ ],” writes Kandinsky, “is in essence

the one invariable law of art.”30 In the almanac Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider ) in 1912,
he added that form emerges as the product of internal necessity, affiliating it
with the impulse to abstraction.31 Internal necessity, a key concept in romanti-
cism, especially in the philosophical writing of Friedrich Schelling, would be-
come Kandinsky’s maxim of new art. His and Bely’s aesthetic claim—that the
artist who has heard its call would access his inner experience by means of ex-
ternal form with the purpose of representing the new spiritual reality—had
apocalyptic connotations for each.
Concerned with inner content—spiritual necessity—and outer form and
their reconfiguration in the new arts at the beginning of the twentieth century,
Bely and Kandinsky articulated the relationship in terms that resemble theo-
sophical and anthroposophic thinking about the dematerialized object. The
occult seems to have been a powerful irritant to Kandinsky, contributing to his
turn to abstraction.32 His claim in On the Spiritual in Art that abstract forms
channel the sounding inner spirit reflects a theosophical cum anthroposophic
sensibility
The aesthetic question regarding inner content and outer form concerned
Bely while working on Petersburg (written in part during his intense engagement
with anthroposophy), and he often figured the relationship in theosophic and
anthroposophic terms. The narrator affiliates materialization of thought with
the novel’s key trope “cerebral play” (mozgovaia igra) early on, telling us that the
author has rendered it pictorially, that he has hung pictures of illusions and
refuses to take them down (56); as a result they have assumed a life of their own.
The trope resembles the notion of “thought forms” (representations of mental,
emotional, and spiritual states of heightened consciousness) introduced by
Besant and Leadbeater in their identically titled 1901 book, which influenced
the visual language of early abstraction.33 They claim that thoughts vibrate (an
idea that Kandinsky deploys frequently), assume visible auras, and become
separate floating forms, which they illustrate in the color plates that accompany
Thought-Forms; the images consist of cloudlike, abstract forms seen by clairvoy-
ants that were drawn or painted by artists. In 1913 in a letter to Ivanov-
Razumnik, Bely describes the characters of Petersburg as “thought forms” that
had not yet reached consciousness, writing that the novel and its revolutionary
setting and content were merely the “conventional dress of thought forms.” He
also refers to them as “cerebral play” and suggests to Ivanov-Razumnik that a
possible title of the novel could be Cerebral Play.34
In Petersburg ’s key occult scene, which I examined in the previous chapter,
Bely presents instead of a dematerialized object, a dematerialized subject: the
94       

enigmatic Shishnarfne, who inhabits the fourth dimension. The fourth dimen-
sion is a spatial concept of infinity and unboundedness that became very popu-
lar in European mystical and occult thought at the turn of the century.35 Here
is the Bely passage:
A man of three dimensions leaned against a window and became merely a con-
tour (moreover, two-dimensional); then he became a thin layer of soot [. . .];
and now this black soot, which had formed a human contour, all gray some-
how, was smoldering away into ash that gleamed with moonlight; and the soot
was already flying away: the contour was covered by green spots [. . .] in a
word, there was no contour. Obviously, what happened here was the dissolu-
tion of matter itself; the whole material substance was transformed into a deaf-
ening sounding substance that was jabbering away—but where? It seemed to
Alexander Ivanovich that it was jabbering away inside him. [. . .] “Petersburg
has four, not three, dimensions [says Shishnarfne]; the fourth [. . .] is not indi-
cated on maps at all except by a dot, since the dot is the place where the plane
of being is tangential to the surface of the sphere and the immense astral cos-
mos; any dot of Petersburg space can eject the inhabitant of this dimension in
the twinkling of an eye, so a moment ago I was among the dots on the window
sill, but now I have appeared from a dot in your larynx. (P 297–98)

The dissolution of Shishnarfne’s body reflects Bely’s immersion in the

occult that reveals his impulse toward abstraction: Shishnarfne’s body first
morphs into a contour, a thin black, then thicker gray, line, followed by green
spots, and finally into a point (tochka) of dematerialized sound that emerges
from Dudkin’s larynx.36 The metamorphosis seems to evoke one of Steiner’s
meditation exercises, in which the student abstains from breathing and concen-
trates on “a point inside the larynx, while he fills his consciousness exclusively
with the image: I am. If these exercises in concentration are continued strenu-
ously for several weeks,” writes Steiner, “something will be felt at those points
upon which the consciousness has been focused: at the root of the nose, in the
larynx, a stream in the hands and arms and on the whole outer surface of the
body.”37 The vibrating dot of Petersburg’s fourth dimension that gets lodged in
Dudkin’s larynx produces a heartrending shout, which in chapter 2 I compared
to Munch’s The Scream. But in the anthroposophic context, the shout—an asser-
tion of the “I am”—may very well have had its origin in Steiner’s meditation
exercises, which Bely did assiduously.
The “sounding substance” evokes not only the hallucinatory “internal ne-
cessity” of Dudkin’s terrifying interlocutor, who turns out to be inside him—or
is him—but also resembles Kandinsky’s obsession with synesthesia and what
Sexton Ringbom calls “the sounding cosmos.”38 Bely’s vision of inner necessity
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 95

is unsettling, however, perhaps because Bely’s metropolis is the space of revolu-

tionary violence, dispersing terror as an expression of the coming urban apoca-
lypse. Yet in visual terms, his Petersburg is seen as the surge from a point, like
the head of the angel in Bely’s Dornach meditational drawing, the locus from
which the swirling motion in it emanates; or returning to the terror in Russia at
the beginning of the century, the surge from a point resembles the representa-
tion of bomb explosions in the satirical journals. So once again, Bely’s image
has multiple meanings, thereby contributing to the spatialization of narrative.
The obvious difference between Bely’s and Kandinsky’s turns to abstrac-
tion has to do with the art each practices, that Petersburg renders the process of
dissolution in narrative terms. Shishnarfne’s dissolution takes place in time, but
by locating it in the fourth dimension, Bely collapses time and space, so that
they form a continuum instead.39 Shishnarfne reinforces the spatial aspect of
his dematerialization by referring to the map, which is defined by a bird’s-eye
view of space, and to the already familiar description of the city as a mere dot
on a map. But in contrast to the famed statement at the end of the prologue,
Shishnarfne’s reference to the city’s cartographic existence is more hesitant: his
Petersburg is located in the fourth dimension, which further destabilizes the
existence of the great metropolis.
Bely places on the verbal canvas splotches of color, thin and thick black
and gray lines, and dots, which are in motion, the result of Shishnarfne’s
morphing body. The dot from which Dudkin’s harrowing shout emerges is the
most mobile—a “sounding substance” and a cosmic emanation. This sounding
substance resembles Kandinsky’s claim that abstract shapes are the expression
of an inner sound, which scholars, especially Ringbom have associated with
Kandinsky’s occult sounding cosmos. Dudkin’s shout into cosmic space is the
culmination of the process of dissolution in this scene, as Shishnarfne is fully
dematerialized by turning into pure harrowing sound that represents the inter-
nal necessity of Dudkin’s, and Bely’s, inner discord.40
But unlike the dot in the larynx, points also expand and form spots, circles,
and spheres in Petersburg 41 and may be affiliated with Kandinsky’s later claim
that the point when freed from its role as punctuation mark is “able to increase
its size ad infinitum and becomes the spot.”42 Writing about Petersburg in his
study of Gogol many years later, Bely describes the origin of the double agent
Lippanchenko (to whom Shishnarfne is directly linked) as “emerging from a
yellow spot of dampness; he steps from the wallpaper, melting into the intrigues
and darkness of the streets.”43
The passage that I have been looking at so closely—and the setting in which
it appears—contests the question of spatial perspective, with the narrative
96       

conflating the distant view and the close-up; the latter is characterized most
palpably by the image of the sounding substance lodged in Dudkin’s throat,
which, moreover, is transformed from spatial into aural substance. The fre-
quent indistinguishability of the close-up and distant perspectives in Petersburg is
one of the features of modernist painting and its abandonment of perspectival-
ized space.
Moreover, Bely’s dots, including the one linked to the shout, typically exist
on the edge of the astral sphere—the subject of many coeval paintings by Kan-
dinsky, as is the sounding point in his theoretical writing: “the smallest elemen-
tary form” and the source of all other forms.44 Bely describes the point in very
similar terms in Petersburg: because the point does not consist of parts, it is the
origin of form.45

Movement , Music, a nd C o l o r

Explosion and the apocalypse inscribe motion, which Bely and Kandinsky as-
sociate with the art of the future and the figure of the horseman. Describing his
youthful aesthetic “method,” which emphasized the sense of sight, Bely claims
its genesis in his experience of horseback riding. He writes in his memoirs that
“the eye of the rider” (vsadnik ) would take in the fleeting blurred images of the
sky and fields as he rode his horse at a fast clip in the countryside and “studied
the rotation of objects and the dance of reliefs,” especially at those times of day
when contours were rendered indistinct.46 The whirl of blurred images (remi-
niscent of his description of the Monet haystack) informed his metaphors,
writes Bely, revealing that his turn to expressivity and abstraction originated in
actual physical experience that he self-consciously staged. The narrator in Pe-
tersburg, whose images of the city at night are defined by the moon as a phos-
phorescent spot, describes the apocalyptic ride of the Bronze Horseman as a
whirl of blurred urban and celestial images. The terrifying motion produced by
the metallic horse and rider inform the narrator’s attendant metaphors of the
sky: “the cloud’s shaggy arms flew madly; foggy strands of witches’ braids flew
by; and among them loomed ambivalently a spot of phosphorus” (100).
Bely and Kandinsky both affiliate motion with spiritual reality, music, and
color, which they bring together in synesthesia. Bely’s 1902 essay “Forms of
Art” links “pure motion,” as well as the spiritual, to music and, in true symbol-
ist fashion, calls for a synthesis of the arts in the spirit of music. Kandinsky ad-
dressed the same questions in On the Spiritual in Art, which was published only in
1911, although he wrote much of it in 1909. “Forms of Art” calls for movement
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 97

from the lower art forms to the higher ones, which according to Bely develop in
time. Bely associates this upward motion with “the abatement of representa-
tions of reality”:
Motion is the fundamental feature of reality. It reigns over the images of real-
ity. [. . .] every art form has reality as its starting point and music, pure motion,
as its final point. [. . .] The essence of motion is understood through music. In
music we hear the hints of future perfection. [. . .] There are no images in
music. Instead we have motifs. [. . .] The causal change of images is replaced
by the rhythm of different tones. [. . .] Music reveals the mysteries of motion,
its essence, which rules the world. [. . .] The center of music is [. . .] in the sym-
phony. [. . .] The depth of music and absence of external reality in it suggest
the idea of the emblematic character of music which explains the character of
motion.47

So music, according to Bely, erases external reality and produces pure

abstract motion, the goal of art. Kandinsky described his turn to abstraction at
the end of the 1900s and early 1910s in terms of the dissolution of external natu-
ralistic form and its replacement by an inner resonance (Klang). In On the Spiri-
tual in Art, he associates artistic representation of the spiritual with the synes-
thetic power of music and pure motion:48

An artist who sees [. . .] the imitation of natural appearances, [. . .] who wants

to, and has to, express his own inner world—sees with envy how naturally and
easily such goals can be attained in music, the least material of the arts today.
Understandably, he may turn toward it and try to find the same means in his
own art. Hence the current search for rhythm in painting, for [. . .] abstract
construction, the value placed today upon the repetition of color-tones, the way
colors are set in motion. (OSA 154)

Kandinsky, moreover, had the unusual capacity to hear color, and more
than likely would have noted a poet whose name was Bely, meaning “white” in
Russian. His disquisition on color inscribes music as well as motion. He speaks
of colors as moving toward and away from one another, producing the musi-
cally inspired synesthetic impulse to the artwork’s spiritual content and to its
abstract representation. He distinguishes between those colors and combina-
tions of color that represent “motion” and those that represent “motionless-
ness.” To the synesthetic concert of colors Kandinsky adumbrates the “struc-
ture of simple lines, serving the general movement repeated in the [painting’s]
individual parts” (OSA 215). And like Bely, he discusses his chosen art form in
the terms of symphonic music, ending the essay with a call for purposeful
symphonic structure as the goal of the new painting. Borrowing the term
Wassily Kandinsky, plate 20 in Punkt und Linie zur Fläche (Point and Line to Plane ), 1926 (courtesy of
the Art History and Classics Library, University of California, Berkeley)
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 99

“composition” from music, Kandinsky, starting in 1910, named his most ambi-
tious experiments Compositions. Ten years earlier, Bely had created a literary
genre that he named “symphony,” of which he wrote four; the second, Dramatic
Symphony, appeared in 1902, a year when Kandinsky published actively in Rus-
sian journals. I remind you that “Forms of Art” was published in 1902 in Mir
Iskusstva, in which Kandinsky published one of his “Letters from Munich” the
same year.
The real challenge, however, is to find a way to talk about interart counter-
parts based on a comparison of a verbal and a visual text, in the instance of
Bely’s Petersburg—to talk about the nexus between language and painting. Let
me first suggest a rather straightforward case based on an abstract representa-
tion of intersecting lines of various kinds. The figure of Apollon Apollonovich is
described at one point as a perfect intersection of gray, white, and black lines
on a lithograph. Dudkin’s confused—swarming—thoughts are depicted in
similar terms: as the transformation of wavy lines into zigzags, then intersecting
zigzags, and finally their dissolution and formation of fragments in the shape of
arabesques.
In the prologue Petersburg is described in terms of lines and circles: the
rectilinear Nevsky Prospect and the abstract dot on the map set in two circles. I
also remind you of Bely’s comparison of his writing to splashes of shards and
intersecting continuities that suggest linear and geometric shapes; or the depic-
tion of the senator crossing Nevsky in his carriage as a lacquered cube cutting the
line of the avenue like an arrow. Kandinsky’s illustrations in the later Point and
Line to Plane are instructive in this regard, especially in the example below of lines
and dots consisting of a large point, or circle, at the bottom and a number of
intersecting straight and curved lines and zigzags. I refer you back to my discus-
sion of the affective meaning of the zigzag in Petersburg in the previous chapter.

The Cit y

Let me finally turn to the city more directly and suggest more ambitious corre-
spondences, starting with Petersburg and keeping in mind Bely’s and Kandin-
sky’s concern with color, movement, apocalypse, the occult, and explosivity.
That Petersburg is about urban space is a trite observation—what is striking is the
novel’s phantasmagoric visual representation of the city, especially of Nevsky
Prospect, already evident in Bely’s 1907 essay “The City,” in which man turns
into a “cloud of smoke.”49 The most extensive description of Nevsky in Petersburg
consists of a series of expressive apocalyptic tableaus of the city at night from
100       

three different visual angles that move back and forth between close-up and
panoramic perspectives, a strategy that Bely described as belonging to paint-
ing.50 The strategy became the purview of cinematic experiment, which, as I
write in the introduction, fascinated Bely.51
Movement in the tableaus of Nevsky Prospect is represented through color,
light, verbs that denote motion, and shifts in perspective that produce a sense of
motion. Deictic shifts from “here” to “there” (a technique that abounds in Pe-
tersburg) motivate the movement and guide the readerly gaze. They spatialize
the text and hurl the viewer from one plane of representation to another. The
first tableau moves from recognizable urban descriptions of signboards that
flash on and off to phantasmagoric metaphoric images and unformed organic
shapes. At the center is the prospect, with its shop signs and shops, whose
threatening gaping oral cavities spew blood:
Fiery obfuscation floods the prospect in the evening. Down the middle hang
apples of electric light at regular intervals. Along the sides shines the flashing
glitter of shop signs; here, here, and here the sudden flare of ruby lights; over
there—emeralds. A moment later: rubies there, emeralds here, here, and here.
And the walls of many houses are lit up with diamond lights: words, consisting
of diamonds, “Café,” “Farce,” “Tait Diamonds,” and “Omega Watches” shine
brightly. Greenish during the day, and now radiant, a shop window opens its
jaws wide onto Nevsky; tens, hundreds of hellish fiery jaws everywhere; they
erupt their bright white light onto the stone; vomit opaque phlegm that looks
like flaming rust. And they chew up the prospect with fire. White glitter falls on
the bowler hats, top hats, feathers; the white glitter will dart further, toward the
middle of the prospect, pushing evening darkness away from the sidewalk: and
evening phlegm will dissolve over Nevsky as glitter, forming a dim yellowish,
bloody murk, a mixture of blood and dirt. (P 49)52

The tableau sets bright lights against a contrasting black sky; the dominant
colors are red (fiery, hellish, bloody, rust, rubies), green, and yellow, which can
be read against Bely’s color theory.53 More importantly for this study in
counterparts, the red, green, and yellow move forward, as in Kandinsky’s the-
ory of color, pushing back the black of the Petersburg night; the colors are illu-
minated by electric lights (flood, flare of lights, shine brightly, radiant, glitter).
Motion characterizes their expressivity (open their jaws wide, erupt, vomit,
chew up, hurl), as does dissolution into organic formlessness, for instance, in
the last image of “dim yellowish, bloody murk, a mixture of blood and dirt”—
perhaps a reference to the spots of blood and body liquids produced by a
terrorist bomb, mixed with dirt, and lit by the yellow of the electric lights on
the street.
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 101

Perhaps the most expressive and best known contemporary representation

of such a spot of blood is Mikhail Dobuzhinsky’s October Idyll, a silent comment
on the 1905 Revolution, with a puddle of blood on the sidewalk, blood splat-
tered on the wall, and a doll and a man’s shoe on the ground, suggesting inno-
cent bystanders who may have been killed. The picture, which appeared in the
second issue of the satirical journal Zhupel (Bugbear 1905) is one of Dobuzhin-
sky’s many representations of modern Petersburg.
In the second tableau, Bely’s narrator pans away from the threatening
close-up of the big city, with Petersburg appearing in the shape of a red spot in
the dark night: “From the Finnish marshes the city will show you its locus of
mad sedentariness by means of a red, red spot: and that spot can be seen si-
lently from a distance in the darkly colored night” (P 49). In contrast to the
close-up of modernity’s teeming city, the abstract view of it, motivated by the
distant perspective, is silent, suggesting perhaps that the first verbal picture in-
scribes urban noise, produced by cars, trams, horse-drawn vehicles, and people
on Nevsky.54 The spot suggests the image of an electrified metropolis seen from
a distance, although according to Kandinsky’s color theory, its redness moves
toward the reader as spectator.
The perspective shifts once again, cinematically, and the narrative moves
the reader’s eye back to the city, of which we get a new look. The terrifying red
spot dissolves into a closer view: “the bright bloody glitter that terrified you
from a distance would dissolve into a whitish, not very clean brightness, would
turn into houses with many lights—and only in the end would it disperse into a
large multitude of little lights” (49). Instead of red, the dominant color is now
white, and instead of the demonic lights of Nevsky—as in Nikolay Gogol’s
“Nevsky Prospect”—the city dissolves, or disintegrates (raspalsia). Whereas the
initial close-up was threateningly intense, the median view suggests the city’s
passive dissolution into a more familiar panoramic view, although at the end as
the camera moves closer, we begin to see the lights, not those of Nevsky but of
the city as a whole.
Going back to the first tableau, the image of the sinister city displays
modernity’s urban glitter close up also by emphasizing the role of language:
“words made of diamonds: [. . .] ‘Tait Diamonds,’ ‘Omega Watches.’” The
reference to Tait Diamonds enhances the prospect’s modern artifice: it was
a shop midway up Nevsky that sold American rhinestones of the sort that
Lippanchenko has in his tie clip (straz).55 The glitter of the words made of fake
diamonds engulfs the other signs and then morphs into apocalyptic fire and
ultimately into formless puddles—spots—of yellow phlegm and red blood.
Language dissolves into pictorial images. The third view is white, moving from
Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, October Idyll, cover of Zhupel’, 1905 (courtesy of the Institute of Modern
Russian Culture, Los Angeles)
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 103

shapeless patches of color back to the source—the city’s houses at night. White
is the color of Christ in Revelation, although it is muddied, as is the red of the
first close-up. In Kandinsky’s terms, an admixture of black dims white, threat-
ening to turn it into gray, the most motionless of colors.56 In between the two
representations of the city is a very red spot. However we parse it, the upshot of
the verbal triptych’s meaning is uncertain. The question that the triptych poses
is apocalyptic: will the city that stages the end of the Petersburg text explode, or
will it fall back into motionless stultifying gray, a color that is associated in the
novel with the bureaucrat Apollon Apollonovich?
What is most important for my interpretation of the triptych is that it is un-
equivocally visual in the avant-garde sense: it inscribes a will to abstraction, de-
ploying multiple perspectival planes, shapes, and postimpressionist colors that,
on the one hand, bleed into each other, dissolving the material city and, on the
other, stand apart as separate entities.57
Bely wrote extensively about the meaning of color, starting in 1904 in
“Sacred Colors.” The book on Gogol (Masterstvo Gogolia, 1934) offers his most
complete study of color, including a statistical count of Gogol’s primary colors
and a comparison of Gogol’s style and his own.58 Discussing the relationship
between words that designate nuances of color and abstract form, Bely claims
that sometimes the original meaning of words that represent color disappears:

ore-like [rudyi ] and glowing [rdianyi ] become abstract signs for expressing the
image “red”; furthermore, the image-metaphor “dove-like” [kak u golubia, re-
lated to the word for light blue in Russian] is extinguished and turns into the
adjective azure [ goluboi ] to express a certain spectral color; after the image, the
meaning of the word as something concrete [dove-like] is extinguished and
thereby a term is born: abstraction.59

The conclusion that words of color become abstractions seems particularly

applicable to the description of Nevsky, in which such words as bloody, fiery,
rust, ruby, emeralds, and phlegm dissolve into unshaped splotches of color and are
dissociated from their original meaning. They acquire an emotional content,
evoking Besant’s and Leadbeater’s similar claim in Thought-Forms, and refer-
ence the reverse—that emotions have color. Both Bely’s and Kandinsky’s color
theories were influenced by the theosophical and anthroposophic color codes
that had been developed in Thought-Forms and elsewhere.
So what in Kandinsky’s work could be a counterpart to Bely’s description
of the city, even though Kandinsky’s cityscapes are neither modern nor of Pe-
tersburg, but of Moscow? An obvious place to start is Moscow (1916), an abstract
image of the city that radiates out from a yellow and green spot in intersecting
104       

Wassily Kandinsky, Moscow, 1916 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; copyright 2009 Artists Rights
Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)

planes with semiabstract images of the Kremlin, churches, and tall buildings, as
well as abundant bright patches of red, yellow, green, and black. The context is
apocalyptic, although the emotional tone is more joyful than Bely’s: the red in
the painting is produced by a sunset cum storm, not blood.
Instead of offering a close reading of Moscow, however, I would like to
propose a jarring counterpart, one that is conceptual in the theosophical sense,
and consider Kandinsky’s earlier and atypical Lady in Moscow. My choice is
determined by the painting’s combination of figurative representation and
abstraction and by its very prominent black spot that stands apart, resisting
the other elements in the painting.
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 105

Wassily Kandinsky, Lady in Moscow, 1912 (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; copyright
2009 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)

The 1912 Lady in Moscow combines the figurative representation of a city

street and of a woman with three mysterious spots of black, red, and pink. The
ominous very black spot, or cloud, to which a smaller red circle surrounded by
an aura is attached, suggests impending disaster; it hangs heavily in the sky,
partially covering the red sun and unsettling the primitively painted Moscow
scene. Kandinsky scholars have interpreted the mysterious black shape, which
resembles the spherical shapes in Bely’s novel, as a theosophical image.60 In
regard to Bely, it evokes his disquisition on the symbol in “Window to the
Future” (1904), in which the purpose of the symbol is described as overcoming
the power of the terrifying smile of the Gorgon Medusa on the shield of Perseus:
106       

Vague Selfish Affection, figure 9 in Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought Forms, 1905

“It may be that [. . .] rays [of light] will shatter the huge black spot, which has
arisen like a phantom between us and the light.” The suggestion is that symbol-
ism has been called upon to disperse the terrifying black spot, which represents
Medusa’s gaze that turns men into stone.61
Considered in relation to theosophy, Kandinsky’s sinister black spot, which
threatens the city, red sun, and large pink spot seem to invoke Besant’s and
Leadbeater’s illustrations in Thought-Forms, for example, Vague Selfish Affection.62
From the perspective of Kandinsky’s color theory, black represents absolute
imploding discord; pink and red, warm colors, approach the viewer and move
outward.63 In his terms, then, even though the black spot is ominously im-
mobile, it represents movement through contrast, with the warm red and pink
spots signifying life-affirming motion. The latter is reinforced by the dog,
jumping at something or someone hidden behind the lady, and horse-drawn
carriage. Yet the painting, which is disturbing despite the warm colors and
inscription of humor and everyday life, also insinuates threatening, violent
images. Although the woman is holding a flower in her barely visible left hand,
the image, quite startlingly, also resembles an arm that has been lobbed off,
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 107

portending the disruption that will explode the traditional life of the city; this
is reinforced by the fire tower, in the top right-hand corner, from which hang
three rings signifying fire. If we read the red flower as morphing into the flesh
of the woman’s arm, it introduces a grotesque element into the city scene; for-
mally, however, the image repeats the shades and swirls of color in the abstract
pink spot to the right.
Black and dark blue reside mostly on the right side of the painting, and like
the bloody images in Petersburg, they threaten to move toward the center. And
like Bely’s narrative shifts from close-up to distant perspective and back, the
painting locates several perspectival planes that evoke tension. Although the
street lined with houses inscribes classical perspective, the foregrounded lady
and images of the everyday, including the lapdog on the table, subvert it by
moving into domestic space. The lady is surrounded by a green-blue aura—an
astral body—once again suggesting Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms.
The lady herself, however, resembles a female figure from a painted shop sign,
which destabilizes the painting further by suggesting a close-up of something
absent on the street in the background.64 Shop signs, as in Petersburg, do figure in
another version of Lady in Moscow, evoking, for instance, Dobuzhinsky’s famed
Barbershop Window (1906) and City Types (1908) from his Petersburg cycle, which
the prominent Russian art historian Dmitry Sarabyanov, quite appropriately,
considers expressionist.65 City Types contains a stylized female face and the ab-
breviated word kakao (cocoa); in another version of the Lady (a glass painting),
the word restaurant on a shop sign appears on the city street and is separated
from the image of the woman—it only implies a connection between them.66
Although my point here refers to Kandinsky’s Lady, Dobuzhinsky’s paintings
may be said to inform Bely’s representation of the city in Petersburg even more.67
To anyone familiar with Kandinsky’s Munich abstractions, Lady in Moscow
is strikingly different from his paintings from the late 1900s and early 1910s. So
let us finally consider a Kandinsky abstract painting from this period whose
title references the spot, which may be seen as the emblem of abstraction in his
and Bely’s works. The Black Spot (1912), like other paintings with spot in the title,
reflect Kandinsky’s experimentation with color and form—what he describes
in Reminiscences as “masses, spots, and lines all piled together.” Appropriately,
Kandinsky scholars have interpreted The Black Spot, painted shortly after Lady in
Moscow, as its abstract counterpart.68 In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky de-
scribes black as if it were a dark spot: “an inner sound of nothingness, [. . .] a
dead nothingness as if the sun had become extinct” (185). The description re-
sembles Bely’s representation of the black spot, quoted earlier, as something
that obscures spiritual light.
Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, Barbershop Window, 1906 (courtesy of the Institute of Modern Russian
Culture, Los Angeles)
Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, City Types, 1908 (Tretyakov Gallery)
110       

Wassily Kandinsky, Black Spot, 1912 (State Russian Museum; copyright 2009 Artists Rights Society
[ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)

Blackness, which according to Kandinsky lacks sound unlike other colors, is

dispersed on the canvas. Even though Black Spot is first and foremost an abstract
painting, it still has traces of figuration, which the viewer must look for because
they are obscured by abstract shapes and the liberating abstract use of colors:
on the left is a walled city with towers; on the right are dim outlines of human
figures; on the upper left is a barely discernible troika, which for Kandinsky
symbolized the apocalypse, as did the rider.69 Like other Kandinsky abstrac-
tions from this period, the painting can be read as deploying conflict between
apocalyptic destruction (black spot and threatening lines) and spiritual renewal
and liberation, which are absent in Bely’s Petersburg.70

Spot s

The question remains whether Kandinsky’s and Bely’s recurrent spots, blots,
splotches, dots, and points can be linked to their reception of Monet’s haystack
and its dissolution—into a red spot in Bely’s recollection.
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 111

Although Kandinsky disavowed mimesis in turning to abstraction, his

response to the Monet, as he described it years later, was associated with an
obsessive desire to paint Moscow at the time of sunset: when the setting sun
dissolves the whole city “into a single spot, which, like a wild tuba, sets all one’s
soul vibrating;” perhaps Moscow (see above) was an expression of this desire. He
writes that it took him many years to give it up and to understand the funda-
mental difference between art and nature. Yet the verbal description of Mos-
cow at sunset suggests Kandinsky’s impulse to abstraction, which, like Bely’s,
seems to have started in the contemplation of nature; here, of the changing sky,
especially when it vibrates with bright colors: Kandinsky refers to the sky at
sunset as a synesthetic moment, “a shout of triumph” (R 360). Notably, Kandin-
sky’s nostalgic reminiscence of the Moscow sunset is followed almost immedi-
ately by his reception of Monet’s impressionist Haystack, in which he speaks of
the painting discrediting the object. In contrast to the multiple shouts of despair
in Petersburg, the source of the shout of triumph, according to Kandinsky, was a
shout in nature, not in him, which may evoke in us Munch’s description of the
source of The Scream (described in the previous chapter): that the shout in nature
induced the angst-ridden painting.
Kandinsky’s Reminiscences narrate his quest for an expressive abstract art:
it took him a long time to understand that the internal necessity of a work of art
is fundamentally different from nature’s beauty and its aims and that his angst
regarding the inability to represent the city at sunset naturalistically made no
sense. This realization, claims Kandinsky, “was enough to ‘comprehend’ [. . .]
the possibility and existence of that art which today is called ‘abstract,’ as op-
posed to ‘objective’” (R 361). Yet even though he distanced himself from exter-
nal nature and from the desire to represent it naturalistically, the vibrating red
spot of Moscow, like the Monet, clearly left a deep impression, and discursively
and indirectly he suggests it as the earliest source of his abstract experiments.
Bely’s experience of the changing sky of Moscow in symbolist terms is well
known: together with his young cohort, he would regularly go to the fields of
Moscow’s Novodevichy Monastery at sunset in search of revelatory signs in the
sky, a habit that is reflected in his first book of poetry Gold in Azure (Zoloto v
lazuri ). I have described his physical experiments with the blurred contours of
nature at sunset.71 In “Why I Became a Symbolist” (1928), Bely offers a defini-
tion of the symbol that is related to a childhood experience of a red spot in na-
ture linked to the sun, an experience that he self-consciously constructed, like
the subsequent rides through the countryside on horseback. In his memoirs, he
speaks of his youthful penchant for the “construction of the experience of see-
ing” and its insinuation into symbolist metaphors, adding that his metaphors
were “the product of the gaze.”72 He remembers thinking about the red spot as
112       

“‘something crimson’; ‘something’ is a feeling; the crimson spot is the form of expres-
sion; the one and the other taken together is a symbol,” which, as he writes, is
the creation of something else, something “third.”73 The notion that the sym-
bol is always a dialectical third was already articulated by Bely in “Window to
the Future.”74
Bely’s deceptively simple definition of the symbol in “Why I Became a
Symbolist” resembles Kandinsky’s concept of internal necessity—in the sense
of bringing together subjective emotional experience and form—as well as the
latter’s discussion of Moscow at sunset.75 If we consider Monet’s impressionist
haystacks in similar terms, which some of his contemporaries viewed as sym-
bolic representations, they also produce something third.76 David Burliuk,
writing in the Blaue Reiter, claims that Bely had said that “impressionism is a
superficial form of ‘symbolism.’”77 In this regard, it is noteworthy that the sym-
bolist Mallarmé admired Monet’s late paintings. “By the early 1890s,” writes
Dee Reynolds, “it had become acceptable to link Impressionism with Symbol-
ism,”78 although twentieth-century art historians have resisted the affiliation.
So the spot is not only a visual image in Kandinsky’s and Bely’s oeuvre but
also a symbol, one that Bely originates in nature but goes on to discuss in ab-
stract terms in “Why I Became a Symbolist,” reflecting the symbolist impulse
to abstraction. Going back to the Haystack once again, Kandinsky and Bely
wrote about their responses to the painting retroactively as if their reception of
it was symbolic of this impulse. So their impulse to abstraction ultimately had a
larger philosophical and mystical dimension—the desire to render subjective
experience and the “great spiritual” visually and synesthetically, not naturalis-
tically. In Bely’s case, the impulse reached its highest point in Petersburg and its
urban representation of modernity.
Speaking about the affinities between Kandinsky and Bely, I have linked
several concepts: symbolism, apocalyptic vision, theosophy/anthroposophy,
explosion, splitting of the atom, the city, and abstraction. Although they do not
form a direct continuum, I have suggested an affinity among them: that Kan-
dinsky and Bely viewed the red spot, whose original documented source was an
impressionist painting, not only pictorially but also symbolically. They were
both grounded in symbolism, which was premised on the link of sensory reality
(represented by verbal signs and visual images) and a supersensible abstract
reality: symbols that have their origins in the sensible world necessarily point
to an abstract realm. Their turn to theosophy and anthroposophy imbricated
their subjective discourses in a visual language that was beyond naturalistic
representation. The occult served Kandinsky and Bely both as a source of
abstract images and as a catalyst for uniting external and inner experience.
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 113

Kandinsky’s frequent reference to the vibration of the soul and vibrating colors
bears the stamp of Besant and Leadbeater. Needless to say, Bely’s abstractions
were timid by comparison to Kandinsky’s and always remained linked to
figuration, but then so did Kandinsky’s throughout the Munich period.
They both made wide use of the simplest nonrepresentational forms—dot,
line, and circle. Yet one of the painterly sources of their visual language was an
impressionist painting; impressionism may have been less antithetical to sym-
bolism at the time than we today think. Both, after all, were concerned with the
suggestive aspect of representation. Like the impressionists, Kandinsky and
Bely were obsessed with the dissolution of the object, and in their youth, with
the observation of nature and the city at certain times of day. As Bely writes
regarding the visual in his early poetry, he was a plein air artist who rendered
the fleeting images observed on horseback at sunset, and his metaphors were
the product of ocular impressions.79
One final point regarding interart analogies as they relate to literature and
painting: in making the obvious observation that Bely’s abstractions are timid
by comparison to Kandinsky’s, we should also highlight Bely’s extraordinarily
inventive and rich metaphors as the basis of comparison. If Kandinsky experi-
mented with colors and the ways they inform the dissolution of form, Bely’s
metamorphic images were the pigments that dissolve the sensible world of
Petersburg. He suggested as much himself in the discussion of the relationship
between words and color.


1. Bely wrote that the novel was born in sound, a sensation he had not experienced
before (Andrey Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov [ Moscow: Khudozhe-
stvennaia literatura, 1990]), 435. One of the few contemporary scholars who has given
serious consideration to the painterly aspect of Bely’s writing is E. V. Zavadskaya, but she
has focused exclusively on his poetry, the best of which according to her is characterized
by visual language, what she calls zrimoe slovo, “the seen word” (E. V. Zavadskaya, “Ut
pictura poesis Andreia Belogo,” in Andrey Bely: Problemy tvorchestva, ed. St. Lesnevsky and
Al. Mikhaylov [ Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988], 469). Zavadskaya writes that the
paintings and drawings of Borisov-Musatov and K. Somov inhabit some of his early
poems (468). The scholar who has considered both the poetry and prose of Bely in rela-
tion to the visual arts is I. V. Koretskaya, who focuses especially on expressionism. Ac-
cording to her, Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri ), his first book of poetry, reveals the influence
of the Secession and Jugendstil artists Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Stuck, and T.-T.
Heine (I. V. Koretskaya, “O simvolizme i simvolistakh,” in Literatura v krugu iskusstv [ poli-
log v nachale XX veka] [ Moscow: IVI RAN, 2001], 41.) See note 6 below regarding Peters-
burg. The novel’s self-conscious inscription of color has been studied, among others, by
the leading Bely scholar Leonid Dolgopolov, in all likelihood because Bely developed a
114       

color theory, which he applied in his own writing (L. K. Dolgopolov, “Printsipy i priemy
izobrazheniia goroda,” in Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow:
Nauka, 1981), 617–19.
2. Nikolay Berdyaev, “Astral’nyi roman (Razmyshlenie po povodu romana A. Be-
logo ‘Peterburg’),” in Andrey Bely: Pro et Contra, ed. A.V. Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Russkii
Khristianskii gumanitarnyi institut, 2004), 411–18.
3. Andrey Bely, “Iz ‘Dnevnika pisatelia’ A. Belogo (Zapiski mechtatelei, 1921, no. 2–
3),” in Bely, Peterburg, 503–4.
4. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 97.
5. In 1911 (when he was beginning work on Petersburg), Bely writes in Between Two
Revolutions that he was fascinated by the new movements in the arts associated with the
names of Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Burlyuk brothers (Bely, Mezhdu, 412–13). Writ-
ing about revolution in 1917, he associates the welcome emergence of new forms of art
with futurism, cubism, and suprematism (“Revoliutsiia i kul’tura,” in Kritika, estetika, teo-
riia simvolizma, ed. A. L. Kazin [Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994], 2:460).
6. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Widening Gyre: Crisis
and Mastery in Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 787.
7. An exception to the norm in Bely criticism is I. V. Koretskaya, who considers
him an expressionist. See especially her essay on Christ Has Risen (Khristos voskres, 1918),
which examines Bely’s image of Christ’s physical suffering in relation to expressionist
painting, starting with Matthias Grünewald’s Mockery of Christ; Grünewald was an inspi-
ration to the Berlin expressionists (“Poema Andreia Belogo ‘Khristos voskres’: ekspres-
siia palitry,” in Literatura v krugu iskusstv, 192). Bely had seen the painting in the Alte Pi-
nakothek in Munich in 1906 and wrote about its powerful impact on him. Koretskaya
also writes about the expressionist sensibility of Petersburg, but not with any specificity.
Her main point seems to be contra Berdyaev and his cubist reading of the novel, based
on the fact that Bely had expressed a negative view of cubism (“futurisms, cubisms are
destroying art for us”), which I don’t consider a strong argument (Bely also expressed
the opposite opinion) despite agreeing with her otherwise (I. V. Koretskaya, “O simvo-
lizme i simvolistakh,” in Literatura v krugu iskusstv, 65–66). As in the case of the 1918 poem,
Koretskaya’s emphasis is on the Dresden and Berlin expressionists, not on Kandinsky.
Scholars who have discussed Bely’s writing and thinking in relation to Kandinsky are
John Bowlt (“Vasilii Kandinsky: The Russian Connection,” in The Life of Vasilii Kandin-
sky in Russian Art: A Study of “On the Spiritual in Art,” ed. John E. Bowlt and Rose-Carol
Washton Long [Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1980], esp. 8) and Peter
Lasko (The Expressionist Roots of Modernism [ Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2003], 101–3).
Although this is not the place to raise the thorny question of expressionism in Rus-
sia, let me just say that the labels “futurism” and “expressionism” were not clearly dis-
tinguished before the war, and their practitioners often commingled. So Kandinsky ex-
hibited with the Jack of Diamonds, as did the Burlyuk brothers, Vladimir Tatlin, and
Alexandra Exter (whose work usually is considered futurist); several of Kandinsky’s
poems from Sounds (Klänge) were included in the famed Hylaea (futurist) anthology A Slap
in the Face of Public Taste in 1912 (although he would complain that they were published
without his permission). The point is that the leading futurists Vladimir Mayakovsky
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 115

(whose poetry is as expressionist as it is futurist), Velemir Khlebnikov, Alexey Kru-

chyonykh, and David Burlyuk (the signers of the manifesto A Slap) considered Sounds
(about which more below) congenial to their avant-garde experiments. In the same way
the Russians David Burlyuk and Nikolay Kulbin, who was affiliated with the futurists in
those early years, were included in Kandinsky’s Blue Rider Almanac (1911); Burlyuk’s essay
on Russian avant-garde art was titled “Savages.” On the subject of expressionism in
Russia, see Russkii ekspressionizm: Teoriia, Praktika, Kritika, ed. V.N. Terekhina (Moscow:
IMLI RAN, 2005). It is the first such anthology.
8. This correspondence has been observed by several scholars in recent years, with-
out, however, developing it further, as I try to do in this chapter. Bely saw the Monet at
the French Industrial and Art Exhibit in Moscow in 1891. The date of Kandinsky’s
viewing is uncertain, variously claimed as 1891 and 1896. The annotations in the au-
thoritative Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art suggest 1896 as the most likely date (ed.
Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982], 1:888, n.21). In a re-
cent article, the Russian scholar Natalya Avtonomova rehearses both possibilities: 1891
and 1896 (“Vasilii Kandinsky and Claude Monet,” Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture
9 [2003]: 58–59). The Monet Haystack at the 1891 exhibition also made an important im-
pression on Alexander Benois and Pyotr Konchalovsky. Apparently, Kandinsky fre-
quently referred to it during his Bauhaus lectures after the war, referring to the Haystack
as a starting point of modern art (65).
9. Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 1:363. Subse-
quent page references are noted in parentheses, preceded by the abbreviation R.
10. Andrey Bely, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhe-
stvennaia literatura, 1989), 300.
11. Ibid., 178–84.
12. Spot can also be a synonym for stain. The adults, who according to Bely con-
sidered the Monet disgusting, clearly had stain in mind.
13. Kandinsky’s first teacher in Munich was the Slovenian artist and teacher Anton
Ashbe, and then he studied under the renowned German artist Franz von Stuck. Bely
writes about both in Between Two Revolutions.
14. There were many Russian artists studying and working in Munich in the 1900s.
Among the best known were Alexey Jawlensky, Nina von Werefkin, Igor Grabar, and
Dmitry Kardovsky.
15. Bely heard a course of lectures by Rudolf Steiner and met him personally in
Cologne in 1912. For a discussion of anthroposophy in Petersburg, see Konstantin Mo-
chulsky, Andrei Bely: His Life and Works, trans. Nora Szalovitz (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis,
1977); and Vladimir Alexandrov, Andrey Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
16. Kandinsky was a great admirer of the symbolist paintings of Viktor Borisov-
Musatov, as was Bely, who wrote the essay “Rozovye girliandy” (1906) about his work
after the artist’s death. Among the Blue Rose artists that Bely knew were P. Kuznetsov,
M. Saryan, S. Sudeykin, N. Sapunov, N. Feofilaktov, and N. Milioti.
17. N. R., “Khudozhestvennye vesti s zapada: Germaniia,” Apollon 3, no. 9 (1912): 56.
18. I have found only one reference to Kandinsky by Bely in his published writing;
it is from a later period and has no relation to the questions I discuss here. Alexander
Blok, Bely’s poet-twin, however, referred to Kandinsky’s early paintings favorably in a
116       

review of an art exhibit in Petersburg in 1904, naming the following paintings: At the
Shore (Na beregu), Poets (Poety), and Riders (Vsadniki ) (“Novoe obshchestvo khudozhnikov.
Peterburg. Vystavka kartin v zalakh Akademii nauk,” in A. A. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v
vos’mi tomakh, vol. 5, ed. D. E. Maksimov and G. A. Shabelsky [ Moscow: Khudozhe-
stvennaia literatura, 1962], 674).
19. Commentary in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art suggests—without any
evidence—that Kandinsky was familiar with Bely’s poetry and prose. In the same com-
mentary, the editors write that Kandinsky expressed his apocalyptic vision in a language
reminiscent of Bely’s (96–97).
20. Kandinsky also wrote such reviews for Apollon and must have read both journals
regularly, as did Bely.
21. Andrey Bely, Pervoe svidanie in Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Novaia biblioteka poeta), ed.
A. V. Lavrov and John Malmstad (St. Petersburg-Moscow: Gumanitarnoe agenstvo
Adademicheskii proekt, 2006), 2:31–32. The translation is mine. In the poem Bely refers
to Ivan M. Grevs, the medievalist and originator of the Petersburg excursionist move-
ment, about whom I write in the introduction.
22. Andrey Bely, “Iskusstvo,” Arabeski in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, 2:200.
23. Quoted in Anthony Fothergill, “Reading the Secret Agent Now: The Press, the
Police, the Premonition of Simulation,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary
Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Lancelot Mallios, and Andrea
White (London: Routledge, 2005), 150. (For the French, see Les Interviews de Mallarmé, ed.
Dieter Schwarz [ Neuchâtel: Ides & Calendes, 1995], 75.) Critics responded to the im-
pact of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon as a bomb thrown by anarchists (Patricia Leighten,
Reordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1917 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1989], 89). As to Kandinsky, he described contemporary art as “anarchist” in
the Blue Rider Almanac in 1912 (“On the Question of Form,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings
on Art, 1:242).
24. See, e.g., Mayakovksy’s “Gospodin ‘narodnyi artist” (1927) and the line: “A
Song, /And a verse /—Are a bomb and a Banner.”
25. In Nachalo veka, Bely describes the symbolist poet as a “bomb thrower” whose
soul is dynamite (Andrey Bely, Nachalo veka, ed. A. V. Lavrov [ Moscow: Khudozhe-
stvennaia literatura, 1989], 45).
26. Kandinsky makes reference to Dmitry Merezhkovsky in On the Spiritual in Art.
Merezhkovsky, whom Bely knew well, was influenced by Solovyov.
27. Bely’s anthroposophic drawings from Dornakh, located in the Rudolf Steiner
Archive, were exhibited in the Andrey Bely Museum in Moscow in 2005. Some of them
have appeared in Bely publications.
28. For a discussion of the spiral in Petersburg, see Robert Maguire and John Malm-
stad, “Petersburg,” in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. John E. Malmstad (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1987), 96–144. Maguire and Malmstad write that in 1912 Bely
“created a new geometric model to embody, in more or less consistent if not systematic
fashion, one key idea with which he had long been contending: ‘one must create life:
creation before cognition’” (98).
29. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 10. Subse-
quent page references are noted in parentheses, preceded by the abbreviation P.
30. Wassily Kandinsky, “Content and Form,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art,
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 117

1:88. The original Russian version appeared in Salon 2. Mezhdunarodnaia khudozhestvennaia

vystavka (Odessa: V. Izdebsky, 1910), 14–16.
31. Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” 1:239.
32. The most extensive study of the occult in Kandinsky’s work is by Sixten Ring-
bom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract
Painting, published in Acta Academiae Aboensis, Ser. A, 38, no. 2, 1970. The influential Kan-
dinsky scholar Peg Weiss, however, has argued against the influence of the occult on
Kandinsky, claiming that decorative and folk arts served as the main source of his ab-
stract paintings. Yet in recent years as art history has shifted from a formalist approach
to avant-garde painting to questions of ideology and affect, the impact of theosophy and
anthroposophy on Kandinsky has become generally accepted.
33. Kandinsky owned a German translation of Thought-Forms (it was translated into
German in 1908). For a discussion of the influence of the book on Kandinsky and Mon-
drian, see, e.g., Alex Own, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the
Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 230. Bely also read Besant and
Leadbeater. Sofia Petrovna in Petersburg has a copy of Besant’s Man and His Bodies, first
published in 1896; notoriously confusing names, Sofia Petrovna refers to its author as
Madame Henri Besançon, a conflation of Besant and Henri Bergson, whose ideas were
well known in Russia.
34. Andrey Bely to Ivanov-Razumnik, December 1913, in Bely, Peterburg, 516. “My
whole novel,” writes Bely, “depicts by means of symbols of time and place the uncon-
scious life of crippled thought forms.”
35. See Linda Henderson, “Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension,”
in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985, ed. Edward Weisberger (Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987), 219–37.
36. In the previous chapter, I examined Dudkin’s response to the apparition of
Shishnarfne from a very different perspective—as an experience of self-disgust and
homophobia.
37. See wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GuidEsot;lines=583-706.
38. The title of Ringbom’s book (see note 32). Besant and Leadbeater also claim the
stimulation of thought forms by music.
39. “The circle,” writes Kandinsky, “is a synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It
combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of
the three primary forms it points most clearly to the fourth dimension” (Kandinsky to
Will Grohmann, in Lieber Freund: Künstler Schreiben an Will Grohmann, ed. Karl Gutbrod
[Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1968], 55–56).
40. The internal necessity that forces Dudkin to come to terms with Shishnarfne re-
sembles Kandinsky’s view of the inner world as ultimately coming forth as sound.
41. See Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” which examines the relationship
between lines, circles, and spirals in the novel and links it to two coeval Bely essays:
“Liniia, krug, spiral’—simvolizma” and “Krugovoe dvizhenie.”
42. Wassily Kandinsky, “Little Articles on Big Questions: On the Point, on the
Line,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 1:424.
43. Andrey Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1934), 303. Bely’s discussion of
Gogol’s impact on Petersburg is very enlightening, as is the statistical count of colors used
by Gogol (303–8). Consider also Bely’s description of Gogol’s style because it seems that
118       

he is writing about his Petersburg: “you see [. . .] suddenly some kind of turbid spots and
shadows, which don’t refer to the reflection, furrow of its [reflection of clouds] con-
tours” (43); “Gogol was a painter [. . . of ] colorful spots and methods of combining
them” (175); Gogol’s “Petersburg is a ghost-like dot, a stylization; it is a hyperbole for the
sake of hyperbole; and for Gogol, it is an explosion: of the bomb in Gogol” (181).
44. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane: A Contribution to the Analysis of Pictorial
Elements, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 2:542.
45. In another scene, a dot in the senator’s head is described as the locus from
which his power emanates and expands in the shape of concentric circles. The first ref-
erence to the dot in Petersburg ends with the image of the “swarming” city novel, evoking
the anonymous—swarming—crowds of the modern city that, as I suggest in the intro-
duction, cannot be read. The epithet swarming, especially from the time of Walter
Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire, has been associated with his representation of the crowds
of Paris. In Bely, however, swarming is also associated with uncontrollable thoughts, sug-
gesting that they have something in common with the crowd.
46. Bely, Nachalo veka, 146–47.
47. Andrey Bely, “Formy iskusstva,” in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie, ed. L. A. Sugay
(Moscow: Respublika, 1994), 100–103.
48. Kandinsky figures the spiritual life “as a large acute triangle divided into un-
equal parts, with the most acute and smallest division at the top. [. . .] the whole triangle
moves slowly, barely perceptibly forward and upward” (“On the Spiritual in Art,” in
Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 1:133; subsequent page references are noted in paren-
theses, preceded by the abbreviation OSA). Bely makes no references to geometry in
“Formy iskusstva,” yet he was quite obsessed with geometry not only in Petersburg but
also in his theoretical theosophic writing, for example, in “Emblematika smysla.” Cf.
also “the ever-growing union of triangle and spiral, form and movement” in Bely’s
thinking, which (movement) Maguire and Malmstad affiliate with the notion of evolu-
tion (Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 100).
49. Andrey Bely, “Gorod,” in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, 2:324.
50. See the introduction to this volume, note 57.
51. So we could discuss the three verbal pictures and their movement from close-up
to panoramic view and back as cinematic and link Bely’s description of Nevsky to
Gogol’s protocinematic descriptive strategies that move between the close-up and a
distanced point of view, which Bely would consider later in his book on Gogol.
52. See the introduction to this volume, pp. 6–7, for a discussion of Bely’s 1907
essay “Gorod,” in which the modern urban street is described in very similar terms,
suggesting that some of the passages traveled directly to the novel a few years later.
53. Cf. Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia, and its examination of the meaning of individual
colors.
54. In his introduction to the 1909 book of poetry Pepel (Ashes), Bely describes
contemporary Russia in terms of its stultifying wide expanses: Russia’s “nonobjectivity
[bespredmetnost’ ] is terrifying—ghost-like visions arise” (Andrey Bely, “Vmesto predislo-
viia [K sborniku “Pepel],” in Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, Bol’shaia seriia poeta [ Moscow-
Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966], 544).
55. Tait Diamonds was located on the first floor of 32 Nevsky Prospect, on the
corner next to the Catholic church. You can see it on the Web site Mapping Petersburg
(Nevsky Prospect).
Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics 119

56. Kandinsky describes gray, a mixture of black and white, as toneless (absence of
sound) and motionless (“disconsolate lack of motion”). The deeper the gray, the more
suffocating it becomes (“On the Spiritual in Art,” 186). He describes black as the silence
of death against which all colors stand forward and sound.
57. Bely’s pictorial vision of Nevsky Prospect may also suggest Malevich’s more or
less coeval cubo-futurist paintings, for instance, The Englishman from Moscow (1914), which
consists of various planes, bright colors, and words, but with the difference that Bely’s
vision is expressive, or expressionist, not rationalist, as was the cubist aesthetic. I claim
this despite Bely’s incredulous response to Malevich’s Red Square of 1915.
58. Like Kandinsky’s, Bely’s ideas on color were influenced by Steiner, a Goethe
scholar; Steiner’s disquisition on color in turn was influenced by Goethe’s.
59. Quoted in Zavadskaya, “Ut pictura poesis Andreia Belogo,” 464n4.
60. The most extensive reading of Lady in Moscow is by Ringbom, Sounding Cosmos,
94–102.
61. Andrey Bely, “Okno v budushchee,” in Arabeski, 2:133.
62. Figure 9 in Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (London and
Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1905), 40. The image “shows us [. . .] a cloud
of affection [. . .] tinged” with selfishness (41). A full view of Thought-Forms, including fifty-
eight color illustrations, is available online through Google Books. See also Mark Tay-
lor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 70.
63. In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky affiliates the color red with the ringing, pow-
erful, and harsh sound of trumpets.
64. The Lady can also be compared to a lubok figure, which had been popularized
by the Russian neoprimitivists a few years earlier. Kandinsky studied and collected Rus-
sian and Bavarian broadsheets. For a different reading of the Lady, one that locates it in
a particular locale in Moscow and as representing a city fire, see Valery Turchin, Kan-
dinsky v Rossii (Moscow: Obshchestvo druzei tvorchestva V. Kandinskogo, 2005), 235.
He writes that the Lady, who “is dangerous like fire,” represents a woman posing for a
portrait. Turchin also claims that the painting is Chagall-like and the black and red
spots are figurations of the author, Kandinsky.
65. D. V. Sarabyanov, Istoriia russkogo iskusstva kontsa XIX—nachala XX veka (Moscow:
Izd. Moskovskogo gos. universiteta, 1993), 87. It should be noted that Dobuzhinsky also
studied painting with Kandinsky’s first teacher, Anton Ashbe, in Munich.
66. See plates of two variants of Lady in Moscow in Vasily Kandinsky: A Colorful Life, ed.
Helmut Friedel, trans. Hugh Beyer et al. (Cologne: DuMont, 1995), 384–85.
67. Bely seems to have specifically inscribed Dobuzhinsky’s “Barbershop Window”
(without mentioning the artist) in Petersburg. In chapter 2 the stranger with the small black
moustache (Dudkin), forgetting about the reason for his visit to Nikolay Apollonovich—
the delivery of the bundle (with the bomb)—starts telling Nikolay that sometimes he has
the desire to express his thoughts to someone (anyone), even to a “hairdresser doll ex-
hibited in the window” (Bely, Peterburg, 52). Later Dudkin tells him that he is a fetishist,
that men fall in love with him, and that he suffers from hallucinations, and when he sees
Apollon Apollonovich (“a bare skull with huge ears”) and then looks back at Nikolay, he
is reminded of the same “hairdresser doll: a handsome man made of wax with a timid
unpleasant smile on his lips stretched to his ears” (93). Such wax figures were fixtures in
hairdresser’s windows of the time.
68. Ringbom, Sounding Cosmos, 102.
120       

69. The dissolved images in Kandinsky could also be considered the product of the
gradual dissolution of naturalistic form through time, a process that can be observed in
Kandinsky’s work from the beginning of the century.
70. See Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 132–33.
71. Sunsets abound in Bely’s subsequent novel, Kotik Letaev, in which they are
described as spots of bright colors.
72. Bely, Nachalo veka, 146–47.
73. Andrey Bely, “Pochemu ia stal simvolistom i pochemu ia ne perestal im byt’ vo
vsekh fazakh moego ideinogo i khudozhestvennogo razvitiia,” in Simvolizm kak miropo-
nimanie, 418–19. Notably, describing the red spot as “object” and therefore formless,
Bely uses the word bezobraznoe (with the stress on the second syllable), meaning “without
face or image” (bez obraza), in contrast to the same word with the stress on the third
syllable, which means “ugly, shocking, or disgusting.” For a discussion of bezobrázie in
Petersburg, see my chapter on disgust (chapter 2).
74. Bely, “Okno v budushchee,” 131–32.
75. Even though Bely speaks of the red spot in neutral terms here, the one in the
Petersburg chapter “Wet Autumn” (quoted above) is emblematic of destruction, as are the
many other red spots in the novel.
76. Commenting on the introductory essay to the exhibition of The Haystacks in
1891 by Monet’s friend Gustave Geffroy, Richard Schiff writes that “he implied that the
paintings revealed symbolic content” (Shiff, “The End of Impressionism,” The New
Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886 [San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
1986], 65). Shiff ’s essay shows that the impressionists and symbolists overlapped in their
painterly vision, and he emphasizes the subjective aspect of impressionism.
77. D. Burliuk, “The ‘Savages’ of Russia,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, edited by
Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, ed. Klaus Lankheit, trans. Henning Falkenstein (Lon-
don: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 72. I have not been able to corroborate this statement
anywhere. According to V. N. Terekhina, the Russian futurists in the years 1910 to 1914
were multiply connected with German expressionists (“Putiami russkogo ekspressio-
nizma,” in Russkii ekspressionizm: Teoriia, Praktika, Kritika, ed. V.N. Terekhina [ Moscow:
IMLI RAN, 2005], 12).
78. Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 203
79. Bely, Nachalo veka, 146–47.
    

Peter sburg,
the City
 4
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life”
Reading and Riding St. Petersburg’s Trams

     

[. . .] amidst the flight and din, the shuddering and the droshkys, listening to the
distant melodious voice of automobile roulades and the rising drone of the yel-
low and red streetcars (the drone that then dies again), in the constant bawling
of the clamorous newspaper boys.
From one infinity he ran on into another; and—he stumbled on the em-
bankment, where everything came to an end: the melodic voice of the auto-
mobile roulade, the yellow and red streetcar and the shady type himself; here
was the edge of the world, and the end of infinities.
[. . .]
Here, at the very beginning, I must break the thread of my narrative, in
order to introduce the reader to the scene of the action of a certain drama. As a
preliminary, it is necessary to correct the inaccuracy that has crept into our text;
it is not the author who is to blame for this, but the authorial pen: at this time
the tram did not yet run in the city: this was the year 1905.1

“Here, at the very beginning . . . the thread of [the] narrative” must be broken. While the
metafictional hesitation and digression of Andrey Bely’s narrator evoke the
eighteenth-century style of Laurence Sterne, they remind us too that, in the age
in which he writes, the pursuit of a novel’s narrative has become a problematic
task. The temporal dimension of the narrative, its thread of sequentiality, is

123
124     

momentarily broken (before it is barely begun) to voice the possibility of its

ceding the way to the dramatic “scene of the action” (mesto deistviia), the pre-
dominantly spatial dimension. Indeed, the relationship between these two sets
of narrative coordinates is no longer automatic, integral, or stable in Bely’s
novel. This section of its first chapter closes with the solemn declaration of the
“scene of the action”—the year 1905 and the city as a historical arena for revo-
lutionary events. But the chatty narrator reminds us that trams did not yet run
on the city’s streets in 1905. They appeared only in 1907. This recreation of the
year 1905 summons the tram out of its own time and splices the commonplace
vehicle into the scene of this revolutionary year. However playful this slip of the
pen may be, Bely’s tram, which strays between the layers of historical and quo-
tidian time, gives an intimation of how the city space is perceived and known
through various temporal frames—and their nonidentity now works as a force
to fragment the modernist novel form.
But what if we were to pursue the narrative of the tram itself ? What kind
of narrative- and form-producing agent is the tram? This is the question I seek
to answer by following the tram through both literary works and the real terri-
tory of the city, seeing how it becomes allied to different narrative and textual
practices—be it modernism’s fascination for the Bergsonian spatializing of
time or the modernist crisis in novel form as it was experienced in the literary
milieu of Petersburg specifically. Along the way I pause to note some of the
tram’s entries into the high-cultural mythologies of Petersburg modernism, as
well as into a different realm of collective knowledge: the urban folklore of the
everyday, such as that collected by Viktor Shklovsky in his sketch “On Street-
car Folklore” (“O tramvainom fol’klore,” 1933). By way of some detours to the
theoretical works that have informed our project as a whole, the hope is that
this essay-excursion on the tram will acquaint its reader with a “city as text,”
where the experience of movement is at once that of narrative and of a most
ordinary practice of everyday urban life.
From Dublin to Berlin to Petersburg, modernist writers found in the tram a
subject with a strong form-creating impulse. In his study of the city and the lan-
guage of the novel, Robert Alter finds in one passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses,
where “[t]rams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging,” rhythmic ef-
fects in the surrounding narrative that he relates to the experience of tram
travel: “One detects in the prose an element of syncopation [. . .] [O]ne may
infer that syncopation attracted [ Joyce] in part because it caught the energetic
stop-and-start rhythms of modern urban life. The stopping and starting are
manifestly linked with the passage of trams.”2 Joyce’s attraction to the tram is
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 125

not unique: the modernist imagination, alert and sensitive to novelty in sensory
and psychological experience, is repeatedly drawn to the distinct nature of the
tram’s stopping and starting movement between points in the city, to its rhythm
and speed, to its metallic sounds, and to the particular relationship to the city
it fosters. (I should also say here at the outset that the subject matter appears
to have left its traces on my own essay, which gathers speed as it advances and,
in the latter section in particular, moves more rapidly, offering its commentary
and making its points with only the brevity that this rapid urban shuttling
permits.)
As for the collective narrative of the project undertaken by this book,
Bely’s anachronistic tramvai provides a model for our mapping of the city. It ini-
tiates the accumulation of transparencies, the overlaying of maps of different
pathways across a single space. The essays of this volume and accompanying
Web site build a picture of urban life at the turn of the twentieth century, thick-
ening time with the simultaneity of superimposed pasts and filling the city space
with the objects, attractions, and experiences of a burgeoning urban moder-
nity. Such a part of this life had the trams become that their sight and sounds
insert themselves anachronistically into the conjured street scene of Bely’s
novel, hinting at what an indelible trace the systems and structures of moder-
nity left on the urban imagination, just as the wires and rails permanently
marked the cityscape. From its beginnings, from Peter the Great’s early proj-
ects of buildings and waterways, St. Petersburg has always been an intensely
mapped space. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a proliferation
of maps produced by and of the city, as all the infrastructures of modernity
(transport, electricity, sewage, telephone) created newly conceptualized “con-
nected” city space, which was fixed into images by the maps of these networks.
The modernist aesthetics of Bely’s Petersburg find a counterpart in the city’s ex-
perience of modernity. The novel’s geometric designs and connective tissue of
motifs may belong as much to the lines drawn across the networked, mapped
city as they do to the aesthetics of cubism or to the angles of Peter’s rectilinear
avenues.
Devoting attention to the tram’s own narrative places us in the company
of Parnok, the would-be hero of Osip Mandelshtam’s 1928 prose piece, The
Egyptian Stamp (Egipetskaia marka), from which the title of this essay is drawn:
Parnok is intent on listening to “the streetcar prattle of life” (tramvainyi lepet
zhizni ) and on hearing in it events of the utmost significance.3 We too can listen
to Petersburg’s trams: first let us hear how the tram came to these streets and
find in its story details that bespeak the city’s greater experience of modernity.
Map of St. Petersburg’s tram network, 1912 (courtesy of the National Library of Russia,
St. Petersburg)
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 127

The Ar riva l of t he Tr a m

St. Petersburg’s first tram made its journey from the Alexander Gardens in
front of the Admiralty to Vasilievsky Island on September 16, 1907. This much-
fêted departure was itself the end of a long journey to bring the tram to the
city’s streets. The first calls to replace the horse-drawn konka with electric tram-
cars came in the 1890s, but wrangling in the commercial world delayed the
realization of these plans. The Horse-Drawn Railway Stock Company held all
the rights to municipal railbound travel and opposed the introduction of the
tram in the name of defending the livelihood of coach drivers and others in-
volved in the care and provision of horses. Economic concerns collided with
anxieties about modernization, the loss of traditional professions, and the
threat of automatization to human labor. An intermediary compromise in the
disputed succession of the konka by the tram came in 1894 in the form of an
electrified route over the frozen Neva. It was operated by a Finnish company,
against whom the horse-drawn railway company tried—unsuccessfully—to
bring a lawsuit. In the winter of 1894, a fare of 2 kopecks paid for the crossing
from Senate Square to Vasilievsky Island. The following winter there was a
route to the Petersburg Side. The journal The World Illustration (Vsemirnaia il-
liustratsiia) reported on the tram-on-ice in both 1894 and 1895, with a slightly
differently accented approach in each year. In 1894 the new Neva crossing
was likened to the roller-coaster rides that had become summer fixtures in the
city’s pleasure parks in recent years, and the report gave only sufficient details
of the set-up to reassure readers of its safety. The following year, however, a
more detailed, explanatory description of the mechanism was forthcoming.4
The difference between these two articles is suggestive of a pattern of response
to the era’s technological progress: new mechanization was initially greeted
with a sensationalist pleasure in novelty—tinged with a certain fear—before
giving way to more clearly defined knowledge and a rationalist grasp of the
phenomenon. Likewise, innovations in material culture made for an attraction
and novelty before they became necessities of everyday life. Russia’s very first
tram was as much a spectacle as it was functional, transporting visitors to the
site of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair in 1896. There the tram itself numbered
among the exhibits on display in the city of Nizhny Novgorod turned grand ex-
hibition space. In its earliest days, Petersburg’s first tram was also an attraction
rather than a purely practical means of transport; people stood in line to buy
tickets to ride for pleasure,5 just as they did for other rides on rails, such as at
the Luna Park of Attractions, or for the so-called American Mountains roller-
coaster ride on Mars Field.
128     

Extensive preparations were required in order to make way for the tram.
Tram parks were built to accommodate the wagons when they were not in
service. The provision and distribution of electricity demanded improvement:
the main power station was located on Atamanskaya Street, by the Monastyrka
River, and electricity was distributed to the tramlines by means of a system of
smaller substations throughout the city. As well as the laying of rails and rigging
of wires, bridges needed to be reinforced, and the sewage and drainage systems
needed to be restructured, so as not to interfere with the tramline down the
center of streets.6 Progress in public transportation was therefore closely linked
to improvements in other aspects of the infrastructure of a modern, connected
city space that supported growing consumption and mobility. The laying of
tramlines down the middle of streets meant that the tree-planted central strip
of some of the city’s boulevards had to be sacrificed. Such was the case with
Ligovsky Prospect—but the street’s remodeling was not necessarily mourned;
rather, it was greeted by many with approval, for it dispensed with an unsavory
area that attracted loiterers.7 The space may have been overhauled, but the
loiterers were presumably left to drift on elsewhere. The possibilities for social
and physical mobility became greater as the trappings of modernity enriched
the material fabric of the city, but nevertheless, a social underclass found itself
ever more displaced from the life endorsed by this progress. The scenes of
urban life photographed by Karl Bulla, the texts of lavish shop signs, and the
advertisements for fine goods compose just one story—one inscribed, above all,
on Nevsky Prospect.
It was Karl Bulla, that avid documenter of urban life, who captured the
ceremonious affair of the first tramline’s opening. Bestowed with the blessings
of Orthodox priests and attended by smartly uniformed employees, the tram
pulled away—eight years after Moscow’s first tram and over ten years after the
Nizhny Novgorod Russian debut. As in so many aspects of Russian culture, be-
latedness was a source of anxiety: Petersburg lagged behind other great Euro-
pean capitals in introducing the tram to its streets. But because it was already
much anticipated, the tram gained swiftly in popularity. In 1905, before the ad-
vent of the tram, the average number of journeys taken on the existing forms of
public transport was 58 per citizen; by 1914, it was 140—a rise that commenta-
tors maintain was only in part accounted for by the expansion of the city limits
and the shift of residential areas away from the center.8 By this time the num-
ber of passengers on Petersburg’s trams rivaled that in Berlin and Paris, but by
1913 these cities—and others in Europe and North America—also already had
metro lines. As one commentary on the history of Petersburg’s public transport
observes, in 1913 in a city with a population of almost two million, the tram as a
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 129

principal means of transport was already an anachronism.9 Anachronism was

an aura that would dog the tram and was discerned by Vladimir Nabokov too,
who was to write in 1925, “The streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just
as the horse-drawn konka has vanished. Already I feel it has an air of antiquity,
a kind of old-fashioned charm.”10 Habitually perceived for its anachronism,
the tram was also marked by bizarrely non-sequential numbering: the first
route was, for unknown and inexplicable reasons, number 4.
Tram No. 4 ran from the Alexander Gardens, along Konnogvardeysky
Boulevard, across Nikolaevsky Bridge to Vasilievsky Island (the first itinerary,
incidentally, of Dudkin in Bely’s novel), and to the intersection of Bolshoy Pros-
pect and the Eighth Line. The tram was not initially the cheap and democratic
form of transport that it came to be known as: initially there were two classes
of travel—five kopecks for first class (for the “cleanly attired public”) and three
kopecks for second class.11 At a time when the salary of a tram-wagon cleaner
was nine rubles per month and that of a tram conductor forty-six rubles, these
sums, in proportion to lower incomes, were not so small.12
The tram network grew rapidly, however, and became used by an expand-
ing section of the city’s population: within a year there were nine routes; by
1912, fourteen, extending out of the central areas as far as Novaya Derevnya in
the north, for instance; by the revolution there were twenty-three routes.13 To
accommodate the growing number of passengers, the two separate classes of
travel were quickly abolished, and in 1916 seats were removed to make more
standing room in an attempt to deal with the fierce overcrowding.14 Shklovsky,
in his characteristically wry style, observes the perils of the overfilled carriages:
“It’s a real squeeze. One of my friends got his rib broken, and another one’s got
pleurisy now as a result of these tramcar contusions.”15 There were other, still
greater perils: misadventures and severed heads (the most famous one, of
course, rolling not in Petersburg, but by Patriarchs Ponds in Moscow—in the
opening chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita) became incorpo-
rated into the field of associations around the tram, to the “streetcar folklore” of
which Shklovsky writes and which holds particular significance for him be-
cause his father was killed by a tram.16 As the volume of traffic—both pedes-
trian and vehicular—increased on the streets, the tramlines acquired a fatal
notoriety. Gruesome headlines became stock-in-trade for the city’s newspapers
as they announced the latest victims: “Two victims of the tram,” “The tram’s
deeds,” “Girl falls under wheels.”17 So frequent were the casualties that the
subject was taken up by the journal Satirikon as early as 1908 in the mock diary
entry of a jaded member of the streetcar commission: “Another person cut in
half ! But they will always clamber onto the rails when the tram has to go by!”18
130     

Tram travel spawns language that is wholly particular to the experience.

Shklovsky collates some of this in his “On Streetcar Folklore,” which is a mini-
ature, affectionately parodic anthropological-ethnographic sketch of tram
travel: an activity of everyday life that possesses its own rituals, communicative
conventions, and classifiable subjects. Much of the situational language to be
overheard in the tramcars is related to their overcrowding: “In streetcar lan-
guage there are about fifty words, divided between a small number of phrases:
‘The tramcar’s not made of rubber, you know’; ‘You’ll be needing a taxi.’”19
Such disgruntled wit was the usual limit of exchange between passengers,
Shklovsky implies, but the shared knowledge of its vernacular and customs—
which bespeak both familiarity with, and resignation to, this most mundane
practice of everyday life—has a socially cohesive function: “Aside from the de-
sire to get home or get to work, the tram-people are united by their folklore.”20
Along with his classification of language, Shklovsky types the passengers—
already dehumanized by the cramped conditions—according to biological
species and subspecies, that is, according to their preferred means of riding the
vehicle:

The flattened streetcar people may be classified by zoological order.

For example, there is the group of people who climb onto the front platform
[ ploshchadka].
There’s the group of people who ride on the rear buffer, holding on to the
bracket with their right hand.
[. . .]
And there’s the subgroup who hang on to the platform handle [na ruchke
ploshchadki ].21

Those riding on the rear buffer traveled for free; this habit, known as ezdit’
na kolbase (kolbasa is Russian for “sausage”), was an entertaining pastime for
youths and took its name from the brake hose that hung down at the back
of the adjoined tramcar and which members of this “subgroup” would hold
on to.22

From t he St ree t int o Tex t

From the introduction of wires and rails into the city to the collected idioms of
tram travel, my account of the tram’s presence on Petersburg’s streets and of
the experience of riding the tram has become increasingly textually oriented
and textually productive. Shklovsky’s brief text suggests one way in which the
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 131

experience of tram travel produces forms of language—those of the most

commonplace, everyday kind. This potential becomes intensified in artistic
works, as the image of the tram enters and proliferates in the literary imagina-
tion. In tracing the literary representation of the tram, I am most indebted to
Roman Timenchik’s dense and exhilarating article of 1987, “Toward the Sym-
bolism of the Tram in Russian Poetry.”23 Timenchik’s article is itself worthy of
some brief commentary on its own status as a contribution to the tram’s textual
existence. The article is notable for its brevity and density (just six pages of text,
and three more of almost one hundred footnotes). The references are exhaus-
tive, but the text is woven from quotation and allusion, moving us through the
material at speed and assuming a certain degree of familiarity with the works
cited. Indeed, it is precisely the familiarity of the tram—the strength of the im-
pressions and associations it generates—that gives the humble vehicle such a
vivid textual life. Timenchik deftly establishes the tram’s semiotic value, un-
packing the “traditional mythological-cultural meanings” contained within this
“capacious cultural symbol”: anthropomorphism, possession of the sense of
sight, erotica, cosmic significance, severed heads, and more beside.24 All of the
qualities he identifies are to be found concentrated in Nikolay Gumilev’s 1921
poem “The Lost Streetcar” (“Zabludivshiisia tramvai”); in some sense the ar-
ticle is an extended commentary on this single work, but by appealing to such a
wealth of material, Timenchik concludes that the poetic image of the tram de-
rives as much from the readers’ own experience and perception of the tram in
life, as from the enduring status of “The Lost Streetcar” in the poetic canon.
Gumilev’s poem is the unstated point of departure of the article, and the point
to which it returns anew, completing the “tram’s turning circle” (tramvainoe
kol’sto) of the piece’s unattributed epigraph.
“The Lost Streetcar,” published shortly before Gumilev’s death in 1921, is,
then, the paradigmatic incarnation of the tram in the Russian modernist liter-
ary imagination, and in its stanzas, the tram—this distinctly modern form of
transport—moves through a space that possesses characteristically modernist
dimensions. The space traversed by the streetcar is simultaneously the unfold-
ing of associative thought and memory and of the real, mappable city.

[Too late. We had already skirted the wall,

We leapt through the grove of palms,
132     

Across the Neva, the Nile, and the Seine

We thundered across three bridges.]26

Around certain points on the route, immediate external reality coalesces with
the lyrical hero’s subjectivity: as he crosses the Neva, the movement evokes
other rivers from Gumilev’s own biographical experience—the Nile and the
Seine—corresponding to the time he spent in Egypt and Paris (in 1907). The
grove of palms might be those of the poet’s exotic travels as well as being evoc-
ative of one of the city’s familiar nicknames, the Northern Palm (Severnaia
Pal’mira). Plotting the coordinates suggested by the poem, Elaine Rusinko sug-
gests that Gumilev’s lost streetcar can be traced through Petersburg, by follow-
ing the route of the No. 7 tram, which passes over Troitsky (Trinity) Bridge.27
As Rusinko demonstrates, the poem plots the dimensions of Bergsonian “du-
ration.” The tram’s movement articulates the individual’s experience of time
as an accumulation and continuous flow: the simultaneous interpenetration
of successive states of consciousness; memory where the past exists always em-
bedded in the present moment of recollection. Thus the lyrical hero’s journey
through Petersburg simultaneously evokes the locations of Gumilev’s foreign
travels of the past. The streetcar gives concrete realization to Bergson’s theory,
which considered motion as “the living symbol of duration,” capturing time in
its flow rather than as a series of discrete units.28 The tram that appears in
Bely’s Petersburg—and at the beginning of this essay—can also be understood as
having lost its way in a narrative temporality of similar dimensions: the con-
jured street scene of 1905 bears the trace of the time of writing from which it is
recollected (1911–12), when the trams were already an established fixture.
No travels—textual or touristic—around the northern capital are complete
without taking in The Bronze Horseman, which was dubbed by Nikolay Antsiferov
as the genius loci of Petersburg and which remains the symbol in which the
elements of the Petersburg myth are most densely concentrated. As Gumilev’s
lyrical hero moves through the expansive dimensions of the city aboard the lost
tram, he encounters the metallic steed (as do, of course, Pushkin’s Evgeny and
Bely’s Dudkin before him):

[And right away a sweet, familiar wind

And beyond the bridge, flying toward me
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 133

The hand of the horseman in an iron glove

And the two hooves of his steed.]

There is a particular kinship between The Bronze Horseman and the tram: as the
successor to the horse-drawn konka, the tram became its iron replacement (or
opponent), populating the phantasmagoric city streets. The city’s traditional
mythology met its new incarnation in this modern form of transportation.
What is more, the construction of tramlines was an occasion to recall the
mythology of the city’s origins: the laying of its rails confronted the notorious
unsuitability of the marshy ground for building upon it. The project of the
tramline construction is ironically elevated to the same status as the city’s foun-
dation, a similar victory in the struggle against nature. The fictitious member of
the streetcar commission grumbles in his satirical diary, “As if it wasn’t Peter
the Great but us who had chosen the spot for Petersburg.”29
Gumilev’s lyrical hero is not the only one to catch a glimpse of The Bronze
Horseman from the tram window. The novelty of the vision afforded by the tram
is captured in the confession of one writer who gleans a view of the statue from
the opposite embankment on Vasilievsky Island: “It’s strange to admit, but ac-
tually I only noticed The Bronze Horseman on the opposite bank from the street-
car.”30 The tram offered a mobile vantage point form which to survey the city.
In the nineteenth century, railroad travel had made available the view of a
landscape in motion, and the electric tram brought a comparable experience to
the urban setting: the city’s familiar landmarks found themselves framed by the
tram windows and sharing the cityscape with these new beasts.31
In this most self-reflexive of cities, whose texts display its endless fascination
with its own myths, topography conspires to offer an equivalent to this self-
regarding gaze: Petersburg, with its embankments facing one another across
the Neva, is a city rich in viewing positions. The view across the Neva offers a
serenely distanced panorama. Move along Nevsky Prospect by tram, however,
and the scenes of the busy thoroughfare change more rapidly. In Nikolay
Otsup’s poem of 1920, “Autumn” (“Osen’”), an autumnal tram ride affords
views of the street’s buildings, notably the House of Singer at Nevsky No. 28
and the House of Vavelberg at No. 7/9. This latter building’s design, with its
rows of arched windows, was apparently in part inspired by the Doge’s Palace
in Venice—augmenting the city’s claim to be the Venice of the North and add-
ing to its collage of imitative European design.
134     

[And from the flying front platform

The granite House of Vavelberg
Flashes at me its lakes of mirrored
Glass with playing colors,
Like on the glassy surface of Lake Geneva,
When on its cold waters
A rainbow bends its ripples.]

In the glimpse caught of the building here, its distinguishing feature is the rows
of windows (reminding the lyrical hero not, alas, of Venice but, as they sparkle,
of Lake Geneva). This view is almost a mirror image of the sight of the tram
itself—rows of separate framed windows. As Vladimir Mayakovsky remarked:
“No artist has yet invented an urban landscape like that which is reflected in
the windows of a moving tram—and for free, moreover.”33 The fragmented,
multiperspectival vision of successive, moving reflections in the tram windows
provided a real-life counterpart to the dynamic aesthetics of cubo-futurism.
The tram’s motion and the brand of visual experience it afforded appealed to
and was transformed by the aesthetics of diverse poetic currents. Each in their
own way, acmeists and futurists (the movements represented by Gumilev and
Mayakovsky, respectively) investigated the materiality of the world (and the
word).
With its mobile vantage point, tram travel also yielded an analogue to cine-
matic vision from among the practices of everyday life. The successive framed
images through the windows were like the sequence of shots on a reel of film.
These similarities did not escape observers of, and participants in, urban life in
other major European cities. One passenger in Berlin of the 1920s noted: “In
the morning, at noon, and in the evening, this city looked at from a focal point
of traffic, resembles an immense, uncontrolled film.”34 In the Russian context
but away from Petersburg, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) bril-
liantly exploited the kinship between the kinetic energy of film and of the city.
As the streets filled with the vehicles and activities of modern urban life, the
city’s sound track acquired new strains. The quotation from Bely with which
this essay opened, for example, contrasts the “melodic voice of automobiles”
with the “rising drone” of the tram. In the first stanza of Gumilev’s “The Lost
Streetcar,” the sounds of the street are transformed into the otherworldly tones
of lutes and thunder:
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 135

[I was walking along an unfamiliar street

And suddenly heard a cawing of crows,
The sounds of lutes and distant thunder,
In front of me flew a streetcar.]

More prosaically, however, the noises of the city provide a regular accom-
paniment to everyday activity; the rhythms and sounds of the streets acquire
the familiarity of a background that is heard but barely cognized. They create
a sound track that comes to belong—with an almost imperceptible insistence—
to the space projected by the sensory coordinates that give the individual a
sense of home, an intimate acquaintance with place that exceeds knowledge of
its mappable space. The Russian formalist scholar Boris Eikhenbaum, writing
on the role of music in early cinema, noted, after Béla Balázs, that one did not
notice the presence of music in film so much as its absence35—and he too heard
the tram in the soundscape of Petersburg:

[ Here is my city: it’s just the same,

Winter and summer, the same land,
Where the tram sings
Chromatic scales in the streets.]

In the autobiographical sketches that incorporate this and other of his youthful
poems, which are found in his curious publication My Chronicle, Eikhenbaum
describes the tramline leading onto Vasilievsky Island, along the University
Embankment.

The Petersburg University is a continuation of Nevsky Prospect. Its main fea-

ture is its corridor: a covered prospect leading into the depths of Vasilievsky Is-
land. The whole island is a system of parallel and perpendicular prospects. The
population lives here according to the laws of descriptive geometry. The move-
ment of the trams also occurs according to these laws. The only exception being
on the embankment, and precisely right by the university, where the rails form
an unexpected and unintelligible bend. It produces a jolt, which lets even the
sleeping passengers know: University.37
136     

He describes the corridor of the university—the long, thin Twelve Colleges

building, which offers only its shortest side facing onto the street—as an exten-
sion of Nevsky Prospect. Indeed, the building is positioned at an angle that de-
viates little from that of the main thoroughfare on the other side of the Neva.
Eikhenbaum refers to the visible, mapped street plan of Vasilievsky’s rectilinear
avenues (the “lines” of the island, which Peter had originally intended as canal
ways and on one of which Bely’s anarchist Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin lives),
but he then notes how the route of the tram creates a special degree of familiar-
ity with this territory: the sharp turn of the tram as it passes from the Palace
Bridge onto the embankment alerts even the sleeping passengers of the destina-
tion. The tram’s movement encodes a bodily, experiential knowledge of the
city. Choosing to relate this vignette to Bely’s novel, where the geometric street
design also plays such a prominent role, we might find in that lurch of the tram
round the bend—sudden and unintelligible—the same visceral contact between
the city and brain that characterizes “cerebral play” and contrasts with the
impassive geometry of the mapped, rectilinear city.

T h e Tra m a nd t he C risis of t he Novel :

In Se a rc h of N a r ra t i ve

Eikhenbaum published My Chronicle, the idiosyncratic pseudojournal that con-

tains his autobiographical sketches, in 1929, marking the end of a period of
painful searching through the second half of the 1920s for a scholarly and writ-
erly occupation that would appease the “longing for acts, longing for biogra-
phy” (toska po postupkam, toska po biografii ) he felt so acutely and voiced in a letter
to Shklovsky in 1925.38 Eikhenbaum’s lament is closely linked to the crisis of the
novel, which became a defining literary-cultural experience in Petrograd-
Leningrad.39 Compare his intimately expressed “longing for biography” with
Osip Mandelshtam’s famous pronouncements in his 1926 essay, “The End of
the Novel” (“Konets romana”): “The future development of the novel will be no
less than the history of the atomization of biography as a form of personal exis-
tence; what is more, we shall witness the catastrophic collapse of biography. [. . .]
Today Europeans are thrown out of their own biographies like balls out of
the pockets of billiard tables. [. . .] A man devoid of biography cannot be the
thematic pivot of the novel.”40 The episodes that Eikhenbaum recounts from
his autobiography—his youthful wandering through the pre-revolutionary
city, straying from anatomy to music to philology in search of a vocation—are
overlaid with the renewed search for fulfillment and “biography” in the 1920s
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 137

at the time of the sketches’ composition. In the age of the novel’s demise litera-
ture itself doubles the writer’s own wandering; both search for a hospitable in-
stitutional milieu: “The fact of the matter is that literature now has neither its
own auditoriums or home [. . .] nor its own study. Literature leads a nomadic
way of life nowadays.”41 My Chronicle allusively harnesses the power of the
nineteenth-century journals (the title echoes the thick journal Sovremennik [Con-
temporary]) that played such a dynamic role in their century’s literary culture. As
a gesture, therefore, of participating in what was perceived as the atrophied lit-
erary process of his times, the writing of My Chronicle stood for the appeasement
of longing for ethically integral action and biography that neither the novel nor
the social-historical milieu could provide in Eikhenbaum’s own age.
Eikhenbaum follows faintly behind another hapless exile from novelistic
narrative, Parnok, would-be hero of Mandelshtam’s The Egyptian Stamp—the
prose work that, as is widely acknowledged, embodies the sentiments of the
essay on the demise of the novel.42 In singling out a narrative of the city created
by the tram, a banal background noise that is the object of nobody’s attention,
we too find ourselves in the company of Parnok, who listens to the “streetcar
prattle of life,” clinging to what is “unnecessary,” transforming immaterial epi-
sodes into the stuff of stories: “From childhood he had been devoted to what-
ever was useless, metamorphosing the streetcar prattle of life into events of
consequence . . .”43
Parnok is described as a “man of Kamennoostrovsky Prospect—one of the
lightest and most irresponsible streets of Petersburg. . . . Venture neither to
the right nor to the left: there is bedlam, there is streetcar-less backwater. But
on Kamennoostrovsky Prospect the streetcars develop an unheard of speed.”44
Stray away from the main thoroughfare, plied by trams after they have crossed
over Troitsky Bridge, and risk finding yourself in the “tram-less backwaters”
(bestramvainaia glush’ ). The margins beckon Parnok; he exists as a doodle in the
margins of the narrator’s page. And margins are to be found everywhere: the
tram tracks branch away from Nevsky Prospect but sustain arterial centers
right through the city. One need not stray far from the activity around, though,
to find oneself as if suddenly on the outskirts.
Parnok tries to share the intimately deciphered sounds of the tram with
the women he falls in love with but, alas, is met only with incomprehension.
Hopelessly unsuccessful in assuming the dimensions of a novelistic hero, he is
not aided by his attachment to life’s “streetcar prattle.” The tram, after all, en-
gendered no great novel—unlike the railroad. The narrator of The Egyptian
Stamp laments: “The railroad has changed the whole course, the whole struc-
ture, the whole rhythm of our prose. It has delivered it over to the senseless
Cover of Osip Mandelshtam’s book of children’s poems Dva tramvaia (Two Trams, 1925; illustrations
by B. Ender) (courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania)
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 139

muttering of the French mujik out of Anna Karenina.”45 Novelistic narrative is

reduced to “senseless muttering” (bessmyslennoe lopotan’e)—which one might hear
as a counterpart to the “streetcar prattle” (tramvainyi lepet ). Moreover, as one
critic, Omry Ronen, observes, the infamous proclamation on the state of con-
temporary prose that brings The Egyptian Stamp to a close may well refer allu-
sively to one of the specifics in Eikhenbaum’s diagnosis of the crisis in genre in
the 1924 essay “In Search of a Genre:” “Railroad literature (zheleznodorozhnaia
literatura) has moved from the station into the city—this is symptomatic, but
there is no prophetic sense in it.”46 Railroad literature (the metaphor also
finds a home in Tolstoy’s novel, where Anna reads an unnamed English novel
on the train) was the kind of popular novel produced in response to commer-
cial demand and sold at railway stations to be swiftly consumed during train
journeys—at the expense of those literary novels of social and psychological
realism whose developed integrity of character and setting had been lost, ac-
cording to Eikhenbaum and Mandelshtam.
The tram plots no novel in the way that the railroad motif punctuates Anna
Karenina, but (and now I take a step back from Parnok and The Egyptian Stamp)
its mappable routes can show us how the city allows itself to be read, how the
movement of the tram and the material of everyday life create narrative. Using
a means of public transport as a metaphor, we can account for the production of
narrative by movement through the city, as does Michel de Certeau, who elab-
orates the now widely embraced idea of the “city as text” in his Practice of Every-
day Life. De Certeau also seeks to ennoble a commonplace fixture of the streets:

In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To

go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor”—a bus or train [or tram,
we might add—AT ]. Stories could also take this noble name: every day they
traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make
sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.47

The tramline plots a linear narrative trajectory; its route, as Timenchik notes,
creates a “realistically” motivated metonymic narrative.48 But the tram also
carries out work similar to the patterning done by motifs in a work of literature:
on its route signboards, its own outwardly visible texts, the tram plucks names
and locations out of the continuity of the city, endowing them with a height-
ened significance as stops along the route. They provide a shorthand way of
navigating the route’s narrative, highlighting the details around which the rest
of the story is constructed. As the lines extended further from the city center,
the names of outlying city margins are borne into the central areas; space is
condensed and made available to the city’s journeyer in its compression, just as
140     

the greater sense of the whole is borne in the literary work’s title or in its sym-
bolically charged motifs.
The tram’s movement combines, then, both design and chance: its iron
tracks specify a predetermined route but navigate the ceaseless life of the city, al-
lowing for infinite possibility in all that the route passes, crosses, and meets. The
modern city with its increased mobility and activity becomes a near-magical
arena of happenings, thanks to the laws of chance. Familiar as Petersburg may
be to its inhabitants, the city streets always retain the possibility to spring the
surprise of serendipitous encounter or happenstance witnessing of event.
On October 3, 1918, in the Petrograd of the civil war, on board a tram
going from Nevsky Prospect along Sadovaya, a chance encounter occurred
between Zinaida Gippius and Alexander Blok.

I’m on a tram, going along Sadovaya away from Nevsky [. . .]

The tram’s full; at Sennaya people are already having to stand in the aisles.
The first person who got on and stood in the aisle, right by me, suddenly said:
“Hello.”
You couldn’t mistake this voice for anyone else. I looked up. Blok.49

It was the last time the poets were to meet. Blok’s poem The Twelve (Dvenadtsat’ )
had just been published, and the ambiguity of its portrayal of the revolution
caused personal allegiances to be redrawn. Gippius tells Blok, here, on board
this form of public transport, that in the public domain there can be no further
acknowledgment of their relationship: “Publicly—the bridges between us are
broken. You know that. Never. . . . But personally . . . as we were before . . .”50
This episode is recorded in Gippius’ memoirs and has become well inscribed in
the narratives of Russian modernism. It owes its status to a chance encounter
between individuals moving through the city at large but momentarily brought
into close proximity in the narrow confines of the tramcar.
Blok too recorded in his diary encounters on the tram, but ones still
more fleeting and anonymous, barely possessing recordable substance. One
entry constructs a narrative—of the poet’s self-image read into the woman’s
appearance—to fill in the scarcely discernible intimacy of a met gaze between
poet and passenger.
A wilting brunette on the tram. We studied one another. Eventually the look
came over her face that I was waiting for and that I often evoke in women:
remembrance, the burden of torments, the approach of passion, obligation (an
engagement ring). She was very tired of these emotional transports [dushevnoe
dvizhenie]. I flung the door wide open in front of her, and she ran off into the
gray night. It was probably a long time before she looked round.51
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 141

Tired of these “emotional transports,” the unknown lady escapes from this
charged exchange of glances and steps down from the vehicle. The intimate
confines and forced proximity of the tramcar produced a space for erotically
charged encounters—with the archetypical Unknown Lady of modernist
Petersburg letters.52
Whether it be the flashes of reflection in the rows of passing windows or
the ephemeral moment of contact offered within, motion augments the role of
chance in the creation of experience in and around the tram. In motion the
tram affords only an acquaintanceship with surfaces—the glittering windows of
the House of Vavelberg glimpsed by Otsup’s lyric hero or the unconsummated
gaze of strangers in the crowd of passengers.
Although Timenchik’s sources do in fact extend beyond poetry, it is inter-
esting that this should be the genre favored by the tram—and not, one might
imagine, merely because it was the foremost genre of those decades of the early
twentieth century. The tram finds a ready textual counterpart in the narrow
confines of the lyric: the creation of brief, self-contained moments of time cor-
responding to the fleeting snatches of experience. Those experiences are all too
physical, as Shklovsky showed us, but transient, nonetheless, and soon to be
diminished by absorption into the life of the city at large, the arena of “real”
significance, and eclipsed by the point of destination, which is determined in
advance for its meaning-bearing value. At stops on the route, then, a different
kind of knowledge is available—the probing of depth; the opportunity to dis-
cover that behind those glittering windows of the House of Vavelberg was
housed the Russian Commercial Bank, and still earlier on that site were the of-
fices of the satirical journal Satirikon. Chance and mobility allow circumstances
to conspire to produce stories in the immediacy of the present, while stasis and
attention allow for the discovery of stories of the past or acquaintance with
individuals who disembark from the anonymous crowd of equals aboard the
tram to resume their own personal narratives—to shop for food, start work,
watch a movie, or meet a lover.
One more layer of narrative to be added to the superimposed transparen-
cies that are the individual maps of our essays and online itineraries is the path-
way that constituted the process of making the map itself—a happy combina-
tion of accident and assiduity in the search for and discovery of material. As
Olga Matich writes in the introduction, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and
his figure of the flâneur and collector have been significant points of reference
for us. Collecting and the collectivity of the project have been two of its defin-
ing characteristics. Much of our pleasure in mapping Petersburg has been in
collecting and assembling materials. As Benjamin reminds us, “collecting is a
142     

primal phenomenon of study: the student collects knowledge.”53 Part of this

collecting obviously went on in the library, but it also traced a route across
present-day St. Petersburg, directing my own travels, for instance, between
various institutions and individuals in the city in the summer of 2005. The
search for material and the acquisition of material objects acquaints us with
real physical places, drawing an itinerary of its own: “How many cities have re-
vealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books?”
asks Benjamin’s collector.54
The Web-based aspect of the project obviously accords a prominent place
to visual materials. In our processes of collecting, we have found ourselves in-
serted into the role of flâneur, whether in the library or the city streets, since the
project has required that we adopt the flâneur’s way of seeing, the “category of
illustrative seeing,” as Benjamin describes it.55 As well as developing commen-
tary for visual material, the project has also required that we seek visual mate-
rial to accompany text—that we search for material with an eye for illustration,
even finding occasionally, as Polina Barskova has on the banks of the Kar-
povka, an illustrator, Dmitry Mitrokhin, not just illustrations.56
The space for the display of our collection is the virtual space of the Web.
While not wishing to speak for the total hegemony of the Internet as a narrative
medium, it is arguably the most contemporary narrative space we possess today
and the one most defining of our own culturally specific moment. In choosing
the Internet to house our collection of materials on early twentieth-century
Petersburg, we are performing the work of Benjamin’s consummate collector:
“The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space
(not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and
so does the anecdote).”57 And what is more likely to spawn an anecdote—the
elevation of the mundane to the “tellable”—than a chance happening on public
transport? “I remember, one evening in Leningrad in the first years after the
revolution the tram stopped on Troitsky Bridge,” writes Shklovsky, who relates
an incident occurring on board: a woman starts to sing, momentarily uniting
the passengers on the broken-down tram in this liminal space between two of
the city’s embankments.58 This is emblematic of how the principles of chance
and mobility give birth to narrative, to stories that are collected by the traverser
of the city’s spaces and that in the moment of their telling forge a certain bond
of collectivity.
Indeed, “in our space” and times, the fate of text—and of ways of appre-
hending lengthy text in particular—is, to some degree, in a process of flux. The
Internet as a technology representative of our age has shaped narrative form.
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 143

As attention spans supposedly dwindle and distractibility in the reading process

intensifies,59 the proliferation of hypertext may well have “changed [. . .] the
whole structure, the whole rhythm of our prose” in our own times (recall
Mandelshtam’s formulation on the railroad). The Internet is changing and
newly framing our modes of perception, adding dizzying speed to the succes-
sion of information before our eyes: now we find that rapid movement on and
between the “windows” on our computer screens remakes our relationship to
information and brings new forms of sensory and nervous stimulation—just as
the increased speed of modern transport brought new sensations and new ways
of seeing through train and streetcar windows.

H ow to end this essay-excursion on the tram? We are in search of narrative

closure. I have already stretched the chronology of our project by following the
tram beyond 1921 and to the end of that decade. As Bely, Gumilev, and Nabo-
kov have shown us, the tram is a reluctant inhabitant of a singular temporality.
Contrary to Nabokov’s conviction that the tram would soon disappear—recall
his 1925 pronouncement from Berlin that “the streetcar will vanish in twenty
years or so”—the trams remain a fixture of Petersburg’s streets and an object of
affection for many of the city’s inhabitants.60 It is, perhaps, precisely that odd-
ity of the tram that Nabokov detected that won it such affection: the capacity to
elicit nostalgia ex nihilo, as it were—to be reminiscent of the past while still a
novelty itself. And the tram has indeed become a noble bearer of the city’s past
and acquired a historical significance that defies its erasure from the streets: it is
remembered especially for its continued service during the Leningrad Block-
ade. The service did stop in December 1941, during the first winter of the block-
ade, but was resumed on April 15, 1942. The observer of blockade life in Lidiya
Ginzburg’s Notes from the Leningrad Blockade finds near-metaphysical significance
in the running of the tram—it is a symbol of connectedness, of the organization
of human life that exceeds any one individual, and as such is a guarantor of the
city’s life and of protection against the slide into nonexistence.61 A worthy nar-
rative agent for the city’s experience of the twentieth century, the tram cele-
brated its one-hundredth anniversary in 2007 and was commemorated with an
exhibition in the St. Petersburg Public Library and by the newly refurbished
tram museum on Vasilievsky Island, which had moving exhibits as well as con-
ventional fixed ones. The moving exhibits included, in commemoration of the
blockade, Memorial Route No. 0, which ran on April 15 along Sadovaya and
Nevsky to Turgenev Square.62
So, how to conclude?
144     

One must finish one’s work. I am thinking of finishing it here. One could tie up
the end with a little bow, but I am certain that the old canon of the synthetic re-
view article or lecture has died. Thoughts synthesized into artificial rows are
transformed into a single roadway, into the tracks of the writer’s thought. The
whole multiplicity of associations, all the countless paths that run in all direc-
tions from each thought are smoothed away. But since I am full of respect for
my contemporaries and know that they must either “serve up an end” or write
at the bottom that the author has died and so there will be no end—therefore
may there be an ending here:
...................................................................
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Upturned sleepers. Smudge pots. Sand. Stone.
Trenches.
“What is this? Roadworks?”
“No, it’s the ‘Works of Rozanov.’ And the tram runs assuredly over the iron
rails.”
(on Nevsky, roadworks)
I am using it for myself.63

Writing on Vasily Rozanov in 1921, Shklovsky gives an intimation of

the crisis in prose form that was to pervade Russian letters in that decade and
that was felt acutely and responded to variously by—among those writers
mentioned in these pages—Mandelshtam, Eikhenbaum, and Ginzburg. An old
form is dead, Shklovsky asserts here, and to avoid also condemning the author
to obsolescence, an ending must be conferred—but a conventional ending
smoothes over the associations and digressions that are part of the authorial
image. Shklovsky’s remarks, as well as their syntax, suggestive of the broken,
disjointed motion of the streetcar and of narrative itself, reveal the uneasy rela-
tionship between narrative form and the sense of self, or of narrative subjec-
tivity, that emerged after modernism. This is a difficult moment of, if not quite
wordlessness, then of narrative hesitation and discontinuity (captured in the
image of traveling in a streetcar on rails under repair). The requirement for
narrative closure poorly accommodates modernism’s no longer unified sense of
the individual and his life. Shklovsky finds his solution in the works of Rozanov,
another consummate compiler of nonlinear, fragmentary narratives, a collec-
tor and assembler of aphorisms and situational reflections—and in the tram,
which runs over the roadworks in progress. In Rozanov and in the tram,
Shklovsky discerns a new model for a form-producing impulse: a line of sense
may be traced through narrative, however fragmentary, that attests to the in-
tegrity of authorial presence, but it combines with the certainty of its railbound
movement a thoroughgoing openness to contingency in all that those rails cross
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 145

and encounter. Shklovsky’s remark sketches—and locates in the modern me-

tropolis, if you will—a commonplace analogy to Georg Lukács’s classic nexus
for the production of novelistic form: the contingent world (that is, the ceaseless
life of the city) and the problematic individual (that is, the dismantled, modern,
self ).64 Shklovsky borrows Rozanov’s ending and the tram as an emblem of
modernity for himself and thus rescues the imperiled literary form.
We might also find, in the project undertaken by this volume and accom-
panying Web site, that the technology emblematic of our age, the Internet, per-
forms the same work as Shklovsky’s tram: the open-ended medium of hyper-
text allows for a narrative work to be specified and named and simultaneously
defies its closure and limitation. The story told of the city has no definitive end
point; it is a work under construction.


1. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dogopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 19. From
the earlier 1916 edition of the novel; the references to the tram were cut from the subse-
quent shorter version.
2. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 126–28.
3. Osip Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1990), 2:65.
4. Cited in E. Shapilov, Ot konki do tramvaia: Iz istorii peterburgskogo transporta (St.
Petersburg: Dzhuliia, 1994), 174.
5. D. A. Zasosov and V. I. Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga 1890–1910–kh godov: Zapiski oche-
vidtsev (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1999), 47.
6. G. Godes, Etot staryi tramvai (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1982), 37.
7. S. E. Glezerov, Peterburgskie tainy nachala XX veka (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf,
2005), 100.
8. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga (from appendix of historical notes), 283.
9. Ibid.
10. Vladimir Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, trans.
Vladimir Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 156.
11. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 47.
12. “Tema: Tramvai,” Adresa Peterburga: zhurnal ucheta vechnykh tsennostei 11, no. 23
(2004): 12.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 47; “Tema: Tramvai,” 13.
15. Viktor Shklovsky, “O tramvainom fol’klore,” Zvezda 5 (1933): 91.
16. Viktor Shklovsky, Zhili-byli. Vospominaniia. Memuarnye zapisi (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1964), 35.
17. Sample headlines from Peterburgskii listok, April 1912.
18. Satirikon, 19 (1908): 7.
19. Shklovsky, “O tramvainom fol’klore,” 92.
146     

20. Ibid.
21. Ibid. The tramcars had open platforms at each end.
22. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 285.
23. Roman Timenchik, “K simvolike tramvaia v russkoi poezii,” Simvol v sisteme
kul’tury. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 21 (1987): 135–43.
24. Ibid., 141.
25. Nikolay Gumilev, “Zabludivshiisia tramvai,” in Sochineniia v trekh tomakh, ed.
N. A. Bogomolov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), 1:297–99.
26. Nikolay Gumilev, “The Lost Streetcar.” I borrow Elaine Rusinko’s translation
from her article “Lost in Space and Time: Gumilev’s ‘Zabludiv† sijsja Tramvaj,’” Slavic
and East European Journal 26, no. 4 (1982): 383–402.
27. Rusinko, “Lost in Space and Time,” 391–92. For further discussion of Trinity
Bridge, see Lucas Stratton’s essay in this volume.
28. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
(New York: Macmillan, 1921), 110. For Rusinko’s full discussion of Bergson in relation to
the poem, see, in particular, 384–88.
29. Satirikon 19 (1908): 7.
30. S. Spassky, Mayakovsky i ego sputniki (1940), 54, quoted in Timenchik, “K simvo-
like tramvaia,” 140.
31. On the new visual experience offered by the railroad in the nineteenth century,
see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in
the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 60–64.
32. Nikolay Otsup, “Osen’” in Tsekh poetov, vol. 1 (Berlin: Efron, 1923), 59. For in-
formation about the House of Vavelberg, see “Nevsky Prospect” on the Web site Map-
ping Petersburg.
33. Cited by Timenchik, “K simvolike tramvaia,” 143. Mayakovsky made his own
attempt to capture the vision afforded by tram travel in his Moscow poem (hence not
dwelt upon in the body of this essay) “From Street to Street” (“Iz ulitsy v ulitsu,” 1913),
whose images, he claims, were suggested by a Moscow streetcar ride. “Perhaps,” Ed-
ward Brown writes, “the repetition of meaningless sound in the opening lines imitates
the metallic beat of wheels on rails” (Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution [Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973], 79).
34. Bernard von Brentano, Wo in Europa ist Berlin? Bilder aus den zwanziger Jahren,
quoted in Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flânerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Cul-
ture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 140.
35. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Problemy kinostilistiki,” in Poetika Kino, ed. R. D. Kopylova
(St. Petersburg: Rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv, 2001), 22.
36. Boris Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik (Leningrad: Izdatel’ pisatelei, 1929), 43.
37. Ibid., 32.
38. Boris Eikhenbaum to Viktor Shklovsky, July 25, 1925, cited by M. O. Chuda-
kova, “Sotsial’naia praktika, filologicheskaia refleksiia i literatura v nauchnoi biografii
Eikhenbauma i Tynianova,” Revue des Etudes Slaves 57 (1985): 27. See also Carol Any,
Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1994), especially chapter 4, “The Formalist in Crisis,” 80–103.
39. On the “death of the novel” as related to the end of Petersburg, see Polina
“The Streetcar Prattle of Life” 147

Barskova, “Enchanted by the Spectacle of Death: Forms of the End in Leningrad Cul-
ture (1918–1934)” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006).
40. Osip Mandelshtam, “The End of the Novel,” in Mandelstam: The Complete Criti-
cal Prose and Letters, ed. and trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ardis, MI: Ann
Arbor, 1979), 200.
41. Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, 125.
42. For further discussion of Eikhenbaum, Mandelshtam, and the crisis of the
novel, see Alyson Tapp, “‘Kak byt’ pisatelem?’ Boris Eikhenbaum’s Response to the
Crisis of the Novel,” Slavonica 15, no. 1 (2009): 32–47.
43. Osip Mandelshtam, The Egyptian Stamp, in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans.
Clarence Brown (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 138. Translation emended,
with reference to Mandelshtam, Egipetskaia marka in Sochineniia, 2:65.
44. Mandelshtam, Egyptian Stamp, 140.
45. Ibid., 162 (2:87).
46. Boris Eikhenbaum, “V poiskakh zhanra,” in Literatura. Teoriia, Kritika, Polemika
(Leningrad: Priboi, 1927), 292. Connection suggested by Omry Ronen, An Approach to
Mandelshtam ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), 289.
47. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 115.
48. Timenchik, “K simvolike tramvaia,” 140.
49. Z. N. Gippius, Zhivye litsa (Prague: Plamia, 1925), 1:66–67.
50. Ibid., 68.
51. Alexander Blok, diary entry of June 13, 1917. Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh,
vol. 7, ed. V. N. Orlov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963), 261.
52. For a brief tour through the “canon of streetcar erotica,” see Timenchik,
“K simvolike tramvaia,” 136.
53. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 210.
54. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 64.
55. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 419.
56. See Polina Barskova’s essay in this volume.
57. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 206.
58. Shklovsky, “O tramvainom fol’klore,” 92.
59. An article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” by Nicholas Carr, which ap-
peared in The Atlantic magazine in July 2008, attracted much attention and intensified
popular discussion of the effects of the hypertext medium on cognition.
60. Plans to reduce the service are frequently met with disappointment and protest
by citizens. At a meeting in a campaign to save the trams of Vasilievsky Island, Svetlana
Motovilova read aloud from her essay on the tram as represented in Roal’d Man-
del’shtam’s 1960s poetry. Conversation with Motovilova, June 2005. The essay was
printed in the journal Petersburgskii universitet (2002), http://www.spbumag.nw.ru/2002/
18/16.html.
61. Lidiya Ginzburg, Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka [1942–1962–1983], in Zapisnye
knizhki. Vospominaniia. Esse (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2002), 617.
148     

62. Larisa Doktorow, “Traveling Back in Time,” St. Petersburg Times, September 14,
2007, http://petersburgcity.com/news/city/2007/09/14/trams/ (accessed January 26,
2008).
63. Viktor Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet, ed. A. Iu. Galushkin and A. P. Chudakov
(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 139. He quotes from Vasily Rozanov, Opavshie list’ia.
Korob pervyi (1913).
64. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of
Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 78.
 5
How Terrorists Learned to Map
Plotting in Petersburg and
Boris Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist
and The Pale Horse

  and          

History is terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is
always easy to trace, but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general
situation which is changing.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror

On 15 July 1904, an armored carriage trailed by two policemen on bicycles

left St. Petersburg’s Aptekarsky Island and sped along Izmaylovsky Prospect
toward the Baltic Train Station. There, the coach’s distinguished passenger,
minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve (1846–1904), would catch the
ten o’clock train to Petergof for his weekly audience with the tsar. As his horses
trotted over Obvodny Canal, a young man dressed as a railway porter ap-
proached the coach and thrust a newspaper-covered parcel at the minister.
When the smoke cleared, all that remained of this equipage was Plehve’s “mu-
tilated corpse surrounded by fragments of his carriage”—at least this is how
Boris Savinkov (1879–1925), who oversaw the attack for the Combat Organiza-
tion (Boevaia Organizatsiia), the terrorist wing of the Party of Socialist Revolu-
tionaries (PSR), described the scene in his 1909 memoir, Recollections of a Terror-
ist (Vospominaniia Terrorista).1 Plehve’s murder caused a sensation. For opponents
of Russian autocracy and those who had suffered under the oppressive minis-
ter, the terrorists (boeviki ) became admired celebrities: congratulatory telegrams

149
150   and       

and donations poured into the PSR’s headquarters in Geneva, and the bomb-
thrower, Egor Sazonov (1879–1910) was cheered as a hero.2 As the main prop-
agandist of the attack, Savinkov was catapulted to fame, and his descriptions
of the assassination, penned under the pseudonym Ropshin, were widely pub-
lished throughout Europe and even appeared in a 1910 issue of The Strand Mag-
azine alongside spy stories and the science fiction of H. G. Wells.3
Despite the celebrations, for many contemporaries the assassination
brought a profound sense of foreboding. In the years preceding the 1905 Revo-
lution, the imperial capital was beset by what was commonly referred to as an
“epidemic of terrorism.”4 Although figures vary, between 1902 and 1911, 263
terrorist acts took place in Russia. Indeed, Plehve was one of three ministers of
the interior to be assassinated in this period.5 Although from our present per-
spective Plehve’s death might seem a rather minor moment, for contemporary
observers ranging from avant-garde intellectuals like Zinaida Gippius to impe-
rial officials like Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich, Plehve’s death marked a
critical juncture—“the beginning of the end”—in the mounting assault on
Russian autocracy.6 In her essay in this volume, Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
notes that Bely was among those fin-de-siècle intelligents who viewed Alexander
Blok’s death as the end of an era; but another key turning point that Bely iden-
tified in his recollections of Blok was Plehve’s murder, which he called a great
“break” (rubezh), whereby Russia crossed over into the revolutionary age.7
Perhaps it was for this reason that Bely drew extensively on Plehve’s
murder in crafting the terrorist conspiracy at the center of Petersburg. Early in
the novel Bely transports his reader to the ominous metropolis by describing a
similar carriage. This carriage clatters along Petersburg’s English Embankment
carrying a dignitary who had been known to describe himself as “a man of the
school of Plehve.”8 On the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Bolshaya Morskaya
Street, another young man steps out of the fog brandishing a sinister bundle.
He pauses, staring furiously at the gentleman in the coach. Transfixed by this
stranger’s piercing gaze, the passenger, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableu-
khov, covers his eyes in terror, his heart exploding in his chest. Fortunately for
the senator, the Stranger, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, does not throw his
bomb that day, but his eyes, “having caught sight, widened, lit up, flashed,”
communicate his murderous intentions to Ableukhov.9 Bely named his fic-
tional senator “Apollon” precisely because the sound pl resembled an explo-
sion. The figure of Ableukhov moves through Petersburg and Petersburg like a
walking time bomb.10
Bely’s Petersburg and Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist draw on similar his-
torical events and make use of some common images and tropes to construct
How Terrorists Learned to Map 151

an explosive fin-de-siècle Petersburg, a city teeming with radicals and seething

with revolutionary tensions. In such an environment, the death of the old re-
gime and its figureheads appeared imminent. However, in both texts the bomb
explosions seem rather anticlimactic compared to the thrilling and suspenseful
period of scheming, planning, and anticipation that precedes them. It is this
process of “plotting” the assassinations that concerns us in this essay, as it clearly
was a chief concern in Savinkov’s retrospective accounts of political murder.
Our essay examines two of Savinkov’s accounts of revolutionary terrorism:
his memoir, Recollections of a Terrorist, and his novel The Pale Horse (Kon’ Bledny),
which describe in great detail how the terrorists endlessly rehearsed and tire-
lessly revamped their plots against the minister.11 Both works take special care
to enumerate the assassins’ many failed attempts before the successful attack.
Interestingly, although Savinkov composed these works simultaneously, in
many ways they are strikingly different. Triumphant in tone, Recollections of a
Terrorist functioned as the PSR’s official history of the assassination plots against
Plehve, Grand Duke Sergey, and others. Although the text is presented as a
personal memoir, the party forced Savinkov, under threat of expulsion, to re-
vise it some twelve times. Recollections of a Terrorist was published in installments
between 1908 and 1912 and appeared as a complete work in the PSR’s news-
paper Socialist Revolutionary (Sotsialist-Revolutsioner) in 1909. By contrast, The Pale
Horse was published anonymously and was deeply influenced by members of
the Petersburg intelligentsia, especially the Gippius-Merezhkovsky circle.12 It
was serialized in Russkaya Mysl’ in July 1909 and appeared as a book that same
year. It is a fictionalized diary detailing the assassination of Grand Duke Sergey
Alexandrovich in Moscow, but a close examination of the text—including
many plot details and specific episodes of dialogue—reveals that Savinkov fre-
quently and liberally drew on the Plehve case and its geographic setting in Pe-
tersburg.13 (In most editions of the novel, the city in which it is set is concealed
as N, but in some it is explicitly referred to as Moscow; in all editions the assas-
sins move back and forth between Moscow and Petersburg so that the terror-
ists’ reflections on the urban experience are clearly marked by both places.)
The novel/diary explores the deep recesses of the terrorist mind and directly
questions the ethics and efficacy of political murder. Not surprisingly, it fasci-
nated the symbolists but outraged many members of the PSR.
Taken together, the novel/diary and the memoir demonstrate how the suc-
cess of the terrorist conspiracy was embedded in the urban space of Petersburg
and Moscow and was contingent upon the assassins’ ability to move skillfully
through that space, order it, and render it readable. In order to plot their at-
tacks against Plehve and the grand duke, they had to plot their pathways
152   and       

through the city, at times deliberately and slowly, at times at high speed, from
different vantage points and modes of transit. The intersection between these
two meanings of the verb to plot is crucial to understanding Savinkov’s works: in
order to carry out the assassination, the boeviki had to learn to map a phantas-
magoric, shifting urban landscape that resisted all efforts to order and control
it. Over the course of their endless rehearsals and adaptations to changing
circumstance, the boeviki became modernist mappers, altering their ways of
moving through the city to fit the deceptive urban environment. In short,
Savinkov’s works underscore how a terrorist act was largely a cartographic en-
terprise, which had to be carefully planned out and projected onto the city
space.
Despite their other literary and historical qualities, Savinkov’s Recollections of
a Terrorist and The Pale Horse are largely propagandistic texts meant to valorize
the assassins’ achievements and their martyrdom for the cause. As many schol-
ars of modern terrorism have emphasized, publicizing an attack—whether it
be through media coverage or the terrorists’ claims of responsibility—was in
fact more powerful (and thus more important) for creating fear, anxiety, and
disorder than the attack itself. In fact, along with advances in technology and
strategy, what largely distinguishes nineteenth-century professional terrorism
from its earlier forms is the centrality of this rhetorical aspect, which necessi-
tates a highly developed public sphere. From this perspective terrorism can be
understood as a political performance that uses violence symbolically (more
than instrumentally) to create disorder and fear. To use Carlo Pisacane’s clas-
sic formulation, it is “propaganda by deed.”14
What is so curious about Savinkov’s works, then, is that in his effort to high-
light the processes of planning and carrying out an assassination, he detailed
each near miss, miscalculation, and misstep for his reader to such an extent
that he effectively undermined the propagandistic effect of his writings. The tri-
umphant tone of Recollections of a Terrorist is often drowned out by Savinkov’s
cries of frustration about the boeviki’s blunders. In The Pale Horse, these foibles
take on an added philosophical dimension, where the assassins’ wanderings
and wrong turns figure as part of the terrorists’ spiritual search for higher
meaning in their actions.15 Although there has been significant scholarly atten-
tion paid to Savinkov’s discussion of the terrorist mind and the moral dilemma
of terror, much less attention has been paid to the fact that he couched the
assassins’ tactical, ideological, and psychological struggles in spatial terms.16 In
this essay we focus on the theme of plotting, to shed light on how Savinkov’s
depictions of both terrorism and his fellow terrorists are firmly rooted in the
modern, even modernist, city.
How Terrorists Learned to Map 153

As terrorists, the boeviki sought to bring both disorder and order to Russian
society. On the one hand, they were confident in their ability to improve and
reshape their environment. Their aspirations to rationally and justly reorder
society and their penchant for developing new technologies—whether in pub-
lishing or in explosives—indicate a certain faith in progress. On the other
hand, as Savinkov suggests, the experience of plotting their attacks in such an
elusive environment gave rise to the kind of crisis-thinking, radical historicity,
acute self-consciousness, and self-invention that are generally associated with
modernism. The Combat Organization’s approach to terrorism was at once
creative and destructive, futuristic and atavistic, scientific and spiritual, and
modernizing and modernist. In this way it exemplified the contradictory im-
pulses of the modern condition, which Marshall Berman has defined as man’s
utopian faith in his capacity to transform the world and his acute anxiety about
disorientation and disintegration. “To be modern,” Berman explains, “is to
live a life of paradox and contradiction.”17 These assassination accounts can
best be understood as part of this larger story of the modernist urban experi-
ence: Savinkov’s texts explore the intersection of plotting the cityscape and
plotting murder.

M a pping t he Unre a dabl e C i t y

If terrorism can be understood as a highly aestheticized, symbolic act that pro-

jects its ideological or political vision onto a social or geographical space, then
it has much in common with mapping. The map is an expository genre that not
only describes but also conceptualizes and explains. Mapping has been integral
to the development of the modern polity as a tool for surveying, navigating,
and partitioning territory, as well as a style of thinking, a way of imagining self,
and of exercising power.18 As geographer/cartographer Mark Monmonier has
shown, “the map is a perfect symbol of the state,” an icon of political, ideologi-
cal, and intellectual hegemony, “an intellectual weapon.” It follows, then, that
mapping is also central to challenging or undoing those polities. Indeed, Recol-
lections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse are excellent narrative examples of what
Monmonier calls “cartographic self-assertion” in politics.19
There was nothing easy or straightforward, however, about this self-
assertion for the boeviki. By the time he was murdered, Plehve had already
survived six attempts on his life. As we have mentioned, despite its exultant
tone, Recollections of a Terrorist is candid about these numerous failures as well
as extremely precise as to the exact configuration of bodies in the city space.
154   and       

Constantly striving to prove his cartographic skills, Savinkov attributes every

failure to spatial challenges, to “poor disposition” of actors, and to reasons
ranging from ignorance about Plehve’s route to imprecise positioning of the
assassins to the failure to account for new street conditions. The conspirators in
both texts even reconsider staging their attack in the street because of such
challenges (RT 44–48, 51, 73; PH 112, 114–15, 117–18). In fact, Savinkov was
much more precise in describing the layout of the city than he was in supplying
temporal markers in his accounts.
This careful attention to space—a focus on landmarks, precise measures,
and other means of fixing points in the city landscape—was a direct response to
the difficulty of reading the urban terrain where the two narratives are set: Pe-
tersburg and, for The Pale Horse, the fictionalized city of N. Along with its name,
Savinkov’s narrator in The Pale Horse also disguises the names of this mysterious
city’s streets, neighborhoods, and outskirts, although numerous landmarks in
the skyline—the placement of spires, towers, and embankments in particular—
suggest it to be some combination of Moscow and Petersburg (PH 154, 155,
157). Despite claiming to recount the assassination of Grand Duke Sergey,
Savinkov’s descriptions of Petersburg and N share many of the same territorial
ambiguities and thematic contours: their landscapes shift, all means for getting
one’s bearings can suddenly disappear, and people and objects are not what
they initially seem. In The Pale Horse, the protagonist, the terrorist known by the
pseudonym “O’Brien,” is alarmed to find himself disoriented by the loss of his
vision—the primary sense required for finding one’s way—in a sudden fog:

Late one autumn night, I was on the embankment. The sea was sighing lan-
guidly; it crept slowly upon the beach and immersed it. There was a fog. All
boundaries became obliterated in the white mist. The waves merged with the
sky, the beach with the water. The wet watery mist enveloped me. I breathed in
the salt moisture. I heard the noise of the water. There were no stars, not a
glimpse of light. A transparent darkness surrounded me. That is how it is now.
There is no visible outline, no end, no beginning. (PH 154)

Even at what ought to have been their moment of triumph, the successful
assassination of Plehve, the conspirators were unable to discern what had hap-
pened. On July 15, upon hearing an explosion, Savinkov hurried toward the
billowing smoke and ash. Peering at the wreckage through the haze, he was un-
able to decipher what had transpired. He left the scene under the delusion that
the minister had survived and his friend had perished and even reported as
much to his coconspirators. In fact, neither Savinkov nor Evno Fishelevich
(also known as Evgeny Filipovich) Azef (who ran the Combat Organization)
How Terrorists Learned to Map 155

knew of Plehve’s death until they read about it in the newspapers (RT 57–59).20
Vision was not the only sense that was compromised or insufficient: on one
occasion, Savinkov was unable to distinguish between the sound of a successful
terrorist attack and cannon fire from that stronghold of autocratic repression,
the Peter and Paul Fortress (RT 47).21
In the memoir, every failure resembles a lesson and each mishap only
strengthens the conspirators’ resolve to complete their task. By giving the pre-
cise geographic and topographic information for four failed attempts—which
take up many more pages than the description of their successful attack—
Savinkov teaches the reader about how they corrected their mistakes. (The Pale
Horse makes this point rather playfully, such as in one scene where the assassins
gather after their latest failure at a dingy bar called Progress [PH 93]).22 The
successful assassination of Plehve, in Savinkov’s view, resulted from minute
planning—including the exact pacing between the assassins—a shrewd read-
ing of “the appearance of the street,” and the right convergence of bodies and
locations in space (RT 75–77).
The terrorists’ efforts at mapping gave rise to a particularly modernist
worldview characterized by transience, opacity, and paradox. Geographer-
cartographer David Harvey has argued that the “new cartographic conscious-
ness,” which pervaded the modernist era, emphasized personal experience and
individual perception. As a result, it moved away from the Cartesian enterprise
of locating a point on a grid and toward the tracking of certain processes and
positioning the self in terms of space.23 Cartographers moved from graphing
static bodies of a fixed distribution to plotting networks, flows, and transfers
of goods, ideas, and populations over space. Such maps are fundamentally
dynamic, transient, and, as Harvey explains, “malleable and variable (relative
and relational).”24 In short, modernist mapping emphasizes motion.
We can see a similar transformation in the assassins’ attempts to map the
city for their attack. Savinkov and his coconspirators initially failed to execute
their plans because they tried to graph them onto a relatively unchanging land-
scape. Indeed, Savinkov’s descriptions of their early attempts show how the boe-
viki were so focused on their objective, the destination guiding their movements,
that they did not give adequate attention to various contingencies, including the
dynamics of the space; to the rapidity of time and space flows; and to the con-
stant variability of conditions. In other words, they mistakenly approached the
city as though it could be plotted on a fixed map. In fact, one way to conceptual-
ize the structures of Savinkov’s memoir and novel is as an exercise in incremen-
tal mapping, where the terrorists constantly redrafted their plans as they learned
to plot patterns of movement on a living, shifting landscape. The vitality of the
156   and       

space also led Savinkov to personify the city in his accounts, as would Bely.
Savinkov described N, for example, as a “breathing,” “bewitching,” and en-
chanted place, where spirits “hover over the swamps and cast their spells” (PH
101, 106). This move recalls Petersburg, where the city quakes and rearranges it-
self, the Ableukhov mansion inhabits two different locations, and the phantas-
magoric, fog-shrouded streets continually cloud one’s vision. By portraying the
landscape as mystifying and spectral, and mapping as a flexible and subjective
process, Savinkov helped to “dispel the cartographic mystique” surrounding
mapping and to present mapmaking as an artistic and impressionistic enter-
prise rather than as a dispassionate and scientific one.25
The opacity of the city’s landscape, as well as the obstacles it set in the
terrorists’ path, was both a practical problem and a rich metaphor for the
philosophical dilemmas occupying the terrorists. By reading The Pale Horse
alongside The Brothers Karamazov and Demons, Lynn Patyk demonstrates how
Savinkov’s novel grapples with the Dostoevskian conundrum regarding vio-
lence based on moral, political, or rational principles.26 In The Pale Horse, each
failed assassination attempt gives O’Brien and Vanya more time to reconsider
their motives and aspirations and thus emphasizes the moral turpitude of their
work. In support of this, we contend that the modernist urban environment
was essential to Savinkov’s understanding of the philosophical struggle within
the terrorist mind. In our view, the opacity of the terrorist’s political vision is
matched by the illegibility of the urban terrain; his confusion about the efficacy
and morality of assassination is expressed by his meandering of the city’s alley-
ways and alcoves, and his concerns about losing his own identity are tied to his
near-constant presence on the crowded streets.

Fir st Enc ount e r s

As soon as Savinkov arrived in St. Petersburg and O’Brien in the town of N, the
two men immediately set out on strolls to explore the city. A newcomer both to
Petersburg and the Combat Organization, Savinkov walked the city’s streets
hoping to meet at least one of his coconspirators, who could give him some in-
struction and introduce him to the local organization. With Azef as the master-
mind behind the plot and his comrades as bomb throwers, Savinkov under-
stood his role was essentially to inscribe Azef ’s vision onto the cityscape by
choosing specific sites for the attack and by coordinating the assassins’ move-
ments (RT 32–33). On his first day on the job, however, Savinkov felt completely
disoriented in the city. Desperately scanning the crowd for a certain familiar
How Terrorists Learned to Map 157

face, he explained: “the farther I walked, the more I lost hope of finding it. I
began to think that the comrade was not in St. Petersburg, that he had either
been seized on the frontier or had failed to obtain a peddler’s license.” Even-
tually, the befuddled Savinkov was found and rescued by this coconspirator
(RT 34).
Perhaps in an effort to prevent O’Brien from repeating some of his mis-
takes, Savinkov made his alter ego a native of N. Already a seasoned assassin,
O’Brien is much more successful than Savinkov on his first day, even catching
a glimpse of his target, the governor. Melding seamlessly into the city environs,
O’Brien boasts: “he did not notice me. I was part of the street for him. I slowly
turned home. I felt happy.” O’Brien stands apart from his creator in his ease
in navigating the city and tracking his target. But like Savinkov, O’Brien
identifies mapping as his primary task in the plot. After this initial success, he
spends the evening at his hotel “studying the plan of the town. I am mapping
out the roads we must follow. I try to reconstruct his life, his daily habits. In my
thoughts I am present at the receptions in his house; I take walks with him in
the garden, behind the gate; I hide beside him at night, I say prayers with him
as he goes to bed” (PH 27–28, 30–31). As O’Brien explains, however, his map is
drawn from the thoughts and habits of his target as much as from the physiog-
nomy of the city.
From this point on, Savinkov’s and O’Brien’s daily activities consist of
constantly moving through space, touring, tracking, and plotting, sometimes
slowly and deliberately, sometimes at high speed. At times both The Pale Horse
and Memoirs of a Terrorist read like guidebooks structured as a series of itiner-
aries on foot or by transport. In his memoir Savinkov boasted that his network
of spies canvassing the city was unprecedented in Russia’s history. “Never be-
fore had revolutionists resorted to observation in the street [. . .] The police
could hardly conceive that members of our Combat Organization were run-
ning about Petersburg as cabdrivers or trading in the streets as peddlers. All the
while, this systematic observation was leading inevitably to the assassination of
Plehve on the street” (RT 33). Because of the shifting nature of the landscape,
the assassins’ plans of attack came to center around what geographer Nigel
Thrift has called “immutable mobiles,” such as strolls, carriages, and railways.27
As narrative devices, they knit the texts together and transport the reader to the
world of early twentieth-century Petersburg. In this sense, they can be under-
stood as cartographic modalities, vehicles of meaning interweaving city sites
and thematic elements.
Savinkov’s works privilege two main ways of viewing and experiencing
these unruly urban settings: one is through the fleeting, sweeping vision of the
158   and       

city framed by the carriage window, and the second, through the freer, more
intimate close-up gaze of the stroller meandering through the metropolitan
maze. Below, we will look more closely at several ways that the assassins moved
through the city space: as passengers peering through coach or railway win-
dows, from atop a coach box as cabdrivers, or as humble tradesmen and gen-
teel flâneurs walking the city.

Aboa rd t he R a ilroa d

The whistles of locomotives provided a compelling soundtrack to Savinkov’s

recollections and novel. Like the city streets, the railway was another overlay,
or as Michel Foucault described it, a “bundle of relations” tying various points
together.28 The railroad is marked by the orderliness and linearity of the tracks.
The train-car window privileges an experience of the terrain that is extremely
detached, sweeping and numbing for—as Michel de Certeau observed—the
overwhelming interiority of the train car can cut the viewer off from reality.29
The boeviki relied heavily on the railroad for evading the police as well as for
bringing new weapons and conspirators into the plot. The railway is treated
very differently in Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse. In the memoir the
boeviki appear quite skilled in their utilization of the rail system. On the day of
the assassination they disguised themselves as railway porters, and their path-
ways through the city, which began at a crumbling church and ended at a
bustling railway station—that “temple” of industry and progress—suggest a
kind of modernization narrative in miniature.30 Indeed, bridges and train sta-
tions not only played an important part in the plot, they also symbolized the
city in transition, thresholds of a new era.
By contrast, in The Pale Horse the train figures as a voyeuristic and dan-
gerous space, where various subcultures of Russian society were thrust uncom-
fortably into close proximity. Even that most modern of symbols, the orderly
and rational railroad was not immune to the chaos and deceptions of the city,
which the close quarters of the train car even intensify. Once one was aboard,
there was no escape from this concentrated atmosphere or from the scrutiny of
other passengers.31 The enclosed, immobilizing experience of that “traveling
incarceration,” the train car, left the boeviki feeling even more vulnerable than
the carriage ride. O’Brien describes one such tense environment when he
travels by rail to the suburban town of X. He is trailing the governor there, who
(like Plehve on his sojourns to Petergof ) was en route to his regular meeting
with the tsar. On one occasion, the Irishman fears that the aristocratic lady
How Terrorists Learned to Map 159

with whom he is sharing his compartment is actually a police spy. He is unable

to calm his suspicions and, rather than watching the governor, he ends up
spending the day following her around X, making inquiries about her at the
police station and even calling on her at home (PH, 62–64).32
For the terrorists the railroad’s orderliness and clean linearity were also
dangerous delusions. Even more threatening than becoming cornered by po-
lice on the train was the possibility of becoming trapped in what Bely’s Dudkin
calls the railroad mentality. This might be described as an exuberant (almost
blind) faith in scientific planning and technology, on the one hand, and an
overly rigid and linear way of thinking, on the other. Given the importance of
modern technology and transit to the terrorists’ operations and weapons, engi-
neering was a natural idiom for them. Both Savinkov and Azef fancied them-
selves to be “technicians of terror.” They emerge from Recollections of a Terrorist
as devotees of precise planning, technological sophistication, and iron disci-
pline.33 According to Savinkov’s depiction, Azef in particular embodied this
ethos. He was an electrical engineer by profession and managed to balance
his double life as a terrorist and a police informer with a position at General
Electric in Russia. Compared to the more spontaneous style of his predecessor
Grigory Gershuni, Azef was reputed for his mechanical mannerisms and his
cool, mathematical approach to murder. His letters to his subordinates are full
of technical jargon and often resemble scientific lectures.34 Compared to Azef,
Savinkov was more an aesthete, but—perhaps in reverence to this scientific
ideal—in Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse he plays several engineers,
including O’Brien and Malinovsky.
At the same time, the relationship between terrorism and engineering, and
the effects of railroad mentality on the terrorists’ operations were unclear. In
The Pale Horse Savinkov pairs terrorism and engineering but often in order to
juxtapose them. At times terrorism represents both anarchic disorder and
science, the imposition of order based on rational principles. Consumed by
this apparent contradiction, the assassins O’Brien, Fyodor, and Vanya vacillate
in their understanding of their mission, wondering whether they believe in
socialism’s ability to perfect society—do they seek to impose a new sociopoliti-
cal order, or are they anarchists opposed to any order at all? This is one of the
core conflicts that haunts the assassins in both texts. At one point, O’Brien
compares his constant vacillation and tendency to return, without resolution,
to the same troubling thoughts about their primary objective with a railway to
nowhere: “life moves in an iron circle,” he explains (PH 73).
Yet Savinkov’s two texts directly question the efficacy of the scientific ap-
proach to politics, demonstrating how, despite all of their careful planning, the
160   and       

boeviki struggled to execute their plans and maintain control over their ranks
and weapons. Both the fictional and real-life boeviki, such as Alexey Pokotilov
and Maximilian Shveytser, died in dynamite accidents. Moreover, almost as
soon as the conspiracy was hatched, their assassins become captive to it. In The
Pale Horse, O’Brien and Vanya describe themselves as prisoners of the mission,
unable to resist the chase, to live outside the terrorist mode, or even to die. As
Vanya explains, “It is impossible to break the chain. For me, there is no way
out, no escape” (PH 50).35 Like Bely’s “sardine tin with dreadful contents,”
their plot is an automatic device that cannot be disarmed. In a Nietzschean cri-
tique of modernity’s naive faith in reason, Vanya also criticizes those “super-
men” who are blinded by rationality and moral righteousness to “lose sight of
God” or, worse still, try to replace him. Just because the killing of the governor
is rational, rationality should not replace morality as the driving force of action.
He warns O’Brien that this poisonous attitude is infecting their ranks: “It’s all
mathematics and reason with us. But when I stood on the little mound that
night, in the midst of a swamp, waiting for death, I realized that reason is not
everything, that there is something above it: but we have blinkers/blinders on
our eyes, we don’t see, we don’t know” (PH 52–53). This sermon, as George
calls it, once again underscores how this questioning of the railway mentality is
couched in spatial terms, particularly the illegibility and unruliness of the city’s
“swampy” landscape.

The Ca r ria ge

“The lanterns of the carriage suddenly flashed in the darkness. I heard the glass
door slam. A gray shadow appeared on the white steps. The black horses
turned slowly round the entrance and drove at a slow trot . . . The governor
had already reached the third gate . . . I waited” (PH 96). The carriage is the
primum mobile driving both Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse, and
more than any other image in Savinkov’s texts, it encapsulates the experience
of terror. It was also central to Bely’s initial conception of Petersburg such that at
one point he considered The Lacquered Carriage (Lakirovannaia kareta) as the novel’s
title.36 These stately carriages served as ubiquitous reminders of aristocratic af-
fluence despised by the PSR. Yet since they were being displaced by the auto-
mobile and mass forms of transit, such as the railroad or, as Alyson Tapp
shows, the tram, they were also representations of the moribund imperial state.
In Savinkov’s works they are moving targets fleeing haplessly about the city’s
perilous streets on paths to nowhere, to political dead ends. The device of the
How Terrorists Learned to Map 161

carriage (kareta), as well as its more humble cousin the horse-drawn cab ( pro-
letka), privileges a certain geographical reading of the imperial city that centers
around movement and the flow of energy. The city appears as a conduit of the
political, economic, and social currents pulsating though Petersburg. In other
words, the carriage, or cab, presents the city as a primarily relational space
characterized by flux and circulation—a skein of entangled streets, communi-
cation networks, commercial ties, and complex social interactions.
The carriage and cab are also among Savinkov’s central mapping de-
vices. Every time his conspirators hailed a cab or tracked the movements of a
carriage, they charted a new course through the city and reconfigured the rela-
tionship between points. According to Recollections of a Terrorist, from 1903 to
1905 almost everyone involved in the assassination plot temporarily posed as
cabbies or fares and spent their days riding about the city monitoring the
minister’s movements in his carriage. It was in the guise of a cabbie that Savin-
kov first became acquainted with comrades Iosif Matseevsky and Egor Sazo-
nov. Unable to separate assassin from driver, Savinkov admits that his impres-
sions of both men were based on the appearance of their uniforms, the state of
their cabs, and their skill as drivers. It was not until some months later in Khar-
kov that Savinkov was reintroduced to Sazonov “for the first time as he really
was, not on a coach box and in a cabdriver’s cloak,” and able to form a true im-
pression of the man. O’Brien has similar experiences in The Pale Horse and even
remarks how one assassin, Heinrich, had come to resemble his horse (RT 43,
55–56; PH 39–40).
In their work, the boeviki had to be skilled at both driving cabs and identify-
ing the minister’s carriage from a good distance away. This privileged a long-
range, panoramic vision of the city, where the cabbie—atop the coach box—
must continually scan the horizon for certain clues. In 1903, when he arrived in
Petersburg, Savinkov’s first lesson in espionage focused on identifying the style
of Plehve’s carriage as well as the look of the livery and driver. The same holds
for Savinkov’s memoiristic and fictional accounts of the grand duke’s murder,
where the author underscored how their task was eased by the especially dis-
tinctive “white harness and green lights” of his carriage, which were “unlike
any other” (RT 34–35, 102–3). The ability to identify the carriage from afar was
among the essential skills necessary for attacking on the street.
In Recollections of a Terrorist, Savinkov applauds his coconspirators’ convinc-
ing performances as cabbies. He fondly recalls how unsuspecting customers
regularly hailed the terrorist-cabbies. Even though it helped to support the
PSR financially, Savinkov regretted that this side business detracted from their
espionage activities. It also brought unwanted competition to the city’s existing
162   and       

tradesmen and drivers, whose resentment and suspicion further threatened the
terrorists’ tenuous position on the street. O’Brien commends his coconspirators
yet is more candid about their shortcomings. For one thing, he gives more
credit to the police guarding the governor, noting that they were acutely aware
that the coachman was a favorite disguise for spies and that they “suspect[ed]
every cabdriver.” Moreover, because they occasionally got lost, their fares
could easily see through the terrorists’ disguises and report them to the police
(RT 48–49; PH 39–40, 59–60).37 After all, most of the boeviki were not from
Petersburg (or N) and naturally made some wrong turns as they learned to
mentally map the city.
The terrorists’ horse-drawn cabs and the government officials’ carriages
offered distinct advantages and disadvantages to their occupants. The cabs
were open to the street, which made them useful for quick escapes. One of
Savinkov’s early, formative experiences as a member of the Combat Organiza-
tion was of running from a spy by leapfrogging “from cab to cab and streetcar
to streetcar.” At other times, O’Brien relies on Vanya’s cab to flee detectives on
his trail (RT 37; PH 80–86). Yet the open cab might also endanger its occupant,
who was entirely unconcealed. Although there were numerous risks in driving
a cab and being spotted by the police, according to Savinkov (whose status in
the organization meant that he rode more than he drove), it was far riskier and
more terrifying to be a helpless passenger. The passenger has no control over
the vehicle’s direction or speed, and in an open cab, he is also visible from the
street. Some of Savinkov’s uneasiest and tensest experiences occur when he is
riding in a coconspirator’s cab. For state officials the enclosed carriage offered
only a limited view of the street through the carriage window. As Savinkov
notes, this was a great advantage when the boeviki were on foot and could
glimpse their carriage-bound targets without fear of being seen. Despite the
protection a carriage might afford—aware of his numerous enemies, Plehve
had an armored carriage made—confinement inside it heightened the occu-
pant’s sense of vulnerability.38

Wa lking t he Cit y

Perhaps because of the perils associated with carriages and trains, when Azef
suggested that Savinkov use an automobile for the attack, the memoirist
strongly objected in favor of moving about on foot (RT 57–58). Indeed, one
of the central strategic questions that Savinkov addresses in both texts is the
relative merits of surveillance by cab and by foot—for most members of the
How Terrorists Learned to Map 163

Combat Organization, this meant a choice between becoming a coachman or

a peddler. For Savinkov, who adopted more bourgeois disguises, the choice was
between riding in a cab or strolling as a man-about-town. These two ways of
traversing the city provided different vantage points and sensory experiences—
the cab strongly privileged vision, while the stroll also activated tactile and au-
ditory senses. In Recollections of a Terrorist this question is raised almost immedi-
ately, for in Savinkov’s very first meeting with one of his coconspirators, the
comrade suggests to him that surveillance work could be done more easily as
a cabbie than in his previous disguise, as a peddler. But as we have seen, as
Savinkov and O’Brien become savvier, they realize that cabbies are far more
conspicuous than peddlers and so pose a greater risk to the organization.
Moreover, Savinkov notes that the rather sweeping and expansive vision of the
cabbie affords very different information than the more detailed and intimate
view of the peddler. He complains that his cabbies are less detailed and system-
atic in their observations—partly because of their perspectives and partly be-
cause they are often hailed by fares and taken off course (RT 35–36, 63–64).
As Savinkov became more skeptical about the carriage as an observational
device, he was increasingly attracted to the guise of the peddler, a role he felt
Ivan Kalyaev played with utmost skill. Savinkov marveled at Kalyaev’s exhaus-
tive knowledge of Plehve’s coach, from the dimensions to the style of door
handles, axles, and harnesses—which he felt could only be obtained from a
street-level view: “With a tray slung over his shoulders and often changing his
wares—cigarettes, apples, writing paper, pencils—Kalyaev wandered about
the streets where he thought he would meet Plehve,” and from this he formu-
lated his own theory of Plehve’s movements: “by certain minute indications,
such as the number of policemen in the street, their outward appearance, the
collection of captains and lieutenants, and the tension at the approach of the
minister’s carriage, Kalyaev was able to determine unmistakably whether
Plehve had already passed through a particular street or whether he was still
expected” (RT 63). Interestingly, Kalyaev’s reputation as a “poet” with a great
artistic sensibility and keen eye for detail as well as a tendency to be consumed
by his “roles” supports viewing the city from a peddler’s perspective. By con-
trast, Savinkov praises Sazonov for his convincing portrayal of a cabbie and for
his more calculated and disciplined approach. Sazonov’s political view was also
more expansive than Kalyaev’s, extending far beyond the individual acts of ter-
ror to the PSR’s aspirations to reorganize Russian society. Although Kalyaev
participated in the plot against Plehve, he did not have to throw his bomb be-
cause of Sazonov’s successful effort. Kalayev did hurl the explosive that killed
the Grand Duke Sergey, and thus he is the major bomb thrower featured in The
164   and       

Pale Horse, and Sazonov in Recollections of a Terrorist. The texts associate the two
assassin’s distinct ways of seeing with their personality types, which in turn
shape the tone and feel of each narrative. Ultimately it was the combination of
these positions and the different insights they afforded that gave the boeviki,
especially their chief visionary, Savinkov, a more unified vision of the plot and
so helped ensure its success. The overarching vision given in his accounts was
made possible only by synthesizing these composite mappings.

Posing a s a F lâ ne u r

The boeviki subverted the social hierarchy not only by attacking elite statesmen
but also by appropriating their dress and manners for their conspiratorial pur-
poses. One of their primary guises, along with cabbies and peddlers, was the
bourgeois gentleman. In this disguise, Savinkov could walk the city more freely,
taking advantage of locales and views available to Petersburg’s distinguished
visitors. On the day of Plehve’s murder, he specifically chose to take a mean-
dering route away from the planned spot of attack so that he could position
himself perfectly in between the minister and the assassins, on the Warsaw
Bridge, which crosses the Obvodny Canal at Izmaylovsky Prospect, close to the
Warsaw Station. The bridge provided a beautiful spot from which to view the
tableau. After the explosion this respectable man-about-town was even guided
to safety by a nearby policeman. Also disguised as a gentleman, O’Brien regis-
ters in the city as a tourist, taking advantage of the expanding tourist industry in
Petersburg and making extensive use of the convenient networks of train sta-
tions and hotels. In the memoir Savinkov mentions at least four Petersburg
hotels that served as key outposts in the plot against Plehve (RT 34, 59, 71, 77).
In fact, the minister was killed squarely in front of the Warsaw Hotel and would
have been plainly visible to its guests and sightseers. The terrorists also impli-
cated the city’s most popular promenades, including the Summer and Yusupov
Gardens, Petrovsky Park, and the city zoo, in the assassinations, carrying out
their meetings in these innocent, recreational surroundings in broad daylight
(RT 47, 72, 78–79).
In his study of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin notes, “no matter what trail
the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime,”39 although
Benjamin tends to discuss the flâneur more as a detective than a criminal in this
scenario. Like the detective’s, the flâneur ‘s penetrating gaze studies, clarifies,
and orders the urban environment. Building on this premise, Benjamin likens
him to a criminologist, botanist, and geologist, who “divide[s] the Parisian
How Terrorists Learned to Map 165

public according to its various strata as easily as a geologist distinguishes the

layers in rocks” and who unearths deeply hidden truths lurking below the sur-
face.40 But, as Tom McDonough has pointed out, the ambiguity of Benjamin’s
formulation leaves open the possibility for the flâneur to play the part of the
criminal, who undermines the urban order. As both cartographers and masters
of urban disorder, Savinkov and O’Brien embody this ambiguity. They simul-
taneously play the roles of detective and criminal, now ordering, now disorder-
ing the illusive Petersburg cityscape.41

The Lone ly Ma n in t he C r owd

Whether flâneur or tourist, detective or criminal, Savinkov clearly savored the

opportunity for theatrical playacting: his memoir provides an impressive ré-
sumé of his repertory of roles. Among his most developed characters was En-
glish businessman Arthur McCullough, who was in Petersburg representing a
London bicycle firm. McCullough lived in the apartment on Zhukovsky Street
with his “wife,” a singer played by terrorist Dora Brilliant; their chauffeur,
acted by David Borishansky; a cook, performed by veteran terrorist Praskovya
Ivanovskaya; and a butler played by Sazonov. When McCullough’s presence
became too conspicuous and too expensive for the PSR, a more modest char-
acter, the Polish dentist Konstantin Chernetsky, replaced him (RT 59–65).
Like his creator, the protagonist of The Pale Horse adopts a multitude of
disguises, including George O’Brien and timber merchant Frol Titov, but his
greatest role, it seems, is that of anonymity itself: “I am a stranger everywhere,”
an “invisible man,” he declares, “I have no motherland, no name, no family”
(PH 59, 33). Even those closest to him call him “the stranger.” This epithet is
one of the most direct links between Bely’s Stranger, Dudkin, in Petersburg and
Savinkov’s fiction. Both novelists drew on that stock figure of the modernist
metropolis, “the lonely man in the crowd,” who moves about the city un-
known and undetected, to underscore the insidious nature of urban terrorism.
But unlike Savinkov, who boasts of his acting talent, O’Brien comes to regard
his apparent invisibility as a great source of anxiety. After so many disguises,
O’Brien mourns, “[I have] lost myself. I am a stranger to myself ” (PH 66, 94–
95, 105). He can fuse himself with the city and yet is no longer at home in it. In
this way O’Brien represents an incarnation of Simmel’s “the metropolitan
type,” who has lost his individuality to the systematizing, atomizing forces of
modernity. By constantly shifting his position and his identity vis-à-vis the
changing landscape—by mapping coordinates or “fixing every one of its parts
166   and       

into a mathematical formula”—the metropolitan type becomes “an agglomer-

ation” of persons rather than one, autonomous subject.42 In the final pages of
The Pale Horse, O’Brien has grown as weary of exploring his own psychology as
he is of wandering through the maze of streets without clarity. His diary entry
for 27 September brings the illegibility of the mental and physical landscapes
together: “I am tired of life [. . .] The same milky fog, the same gray everyday
life. The same love, the same death. Life is a like a narrow street with old low
houses, flat roofs, and factory chimneys” (PH 152–53).

T he C it y a s a Hunt ing G r o u n d

At no point was the scope and fluidity of the terrorists’ roles more impressive
than when their systematic movement through the city was suddenly acceler-
ated by an encounter with the okhranniki, or secret police. Such high-speed
chases and chance meetings drive the momentum of Savinkov’s accounts. This
type of movement is central to the cartographic process as well as to the cre-
ation of suspense in both narratives. In both the memoir and novel, Savinkov’s
descriptions of such encounters, also between the terrorists and their target, are
infused with the simultaneous terror and exhilaration of the chase. The actual
murders seem anticlimactic and take a backseat to the thrills of scheming and
brushing shoulders with the police. Savinkov relays to the reader how the street
mysteriously seemed to draw the assassins into the chase. In The Pale Horse,
there is a clear distinction between interior spaces—be they cafes, theaters, or
the terrorists’ apartment—and the street outside. When O’Brien is inside, he
retreats into his thoughts and lingers over questions of Christian martyrdom
and the efficacy of terror. Once he is on the street, he quickly forgets any mis-
givings about the future or past regrets. He is focused only on the present chase.
This is another manifestation of how the characters’ psychological struggles are
graphed onto the topography of the novel. What is more, O’Brien even admits
that he can no longer walk about the city without cautiously glancing over his
shoulder. Unable to turn off the conspiratorial mode, he envies those passersby
who could be absorbed by petty concerns.
At high speeds, the terrorists’ mapping brought not only multiple viewpoints
and motion through space but also rapid reversals in perspective. Savinkov’s
chase scenes are distinctly multidirectional, such that the space is not configured
toward one destination, and the roles of the pursuer and pursed sometimes
reverse at a moment’s notice. O’Brien describes one such incident when,
upon emerging from a teashop into the street: “I noticed three detectives at a
How Terrorists Learned to Map 167

neighboring gate. I knew them by their furtive eyes and fixed glances. I stopped
at a shop window and stood without moving. I became a detective myself and
watched them. I wondered whether they were on our track.” The terrorist and
the detectives eye each other through the windowpane until suddenly O’Brien
breaks out in a run. As the chase moves from the sidewalk to a nearby cab and
finally back into the street, the roles of predator and prey change several times.
There are times, as O’Brien explains, when “he was the cat and I was the
mouse” and vice versa (PH 80–85).
This is just one of many episodes where Savinkov likens terrorist conspiracy
to hunting, a motif that augments the spatial metaphors undergirding these
works. In one example O’Brien and Vanya compare themselves to hunters
or explorers wading through a swamp (PH 51). This imagery allowed Savinkov
to reiterate the elusive nature of the terrain, which impedes such scrutiny. At
these moments the city emerges not only as a hunting ground but also as an
urban wilderness, where even the most skillful tracker can become disoriented.
At one point O’Brien compares his long stints on the street to a soldier hacking
his way blindly through the African jungle. Reflecting back on the assassina-
tion, he is reminded of memories of hunting and fishing, such as “the time I was
in the north, beyond the polar circle” at an Arctic fishing village: “There was
not a tree in the place, not a bush, not even grass. There was nothing but the
bare cliffs, gray sky, gray gloomy ocean. [. . .] I felt such a complete stranger to
all the sights—to the sky, the sea, the cliffs, the blubber, to those somber people
and their unfamiliar talk. I lost myself. I was a stranger to myself. And today,”
he continues returning to the present moment, “again I felt out of touch with
everything.” As he wanders among “the dull crowd” on the street he cannot re-
gain his bearings in the space that became “dark,” misty, and “obscured” (PH
45, 94–95). What unites the cramped city with the barren Arctic lake is their
ability to defy sensory perception and mastery; they cause the hapless traveler
to lose his way, even his sense of self.
Savinkov develops the hunting motif ’s moral and spiritual dimensions still
further. After first sighting the governor, O’Brien affirms his murderous inten-
tions by comparing the assassination to hunting a hare—if it is acceptable to
kill “for amusement,” he explains, then certainly it should be acceptable to kill
in order to end the suffering of the Russian people. He then recalls how the first
time he went hunting he felt tremendous remorse and sorrow after shooting a
hare, but once he returned home, “I forgot all about it as if it never existed.” Of
course, O’Brien does not have the same casual attitude when a “pack of hare
hounds,” the okhranniki, were chasing him and his companions (PH 30–31, 84).
The most important chase in the novel, however, is not the triad of terrorist,
168   and       

target, and policeman but the dyad of assassin and death. Like the other chases
in the novel, the race with death is also multidirectional. Filled with despair
over the moral gravity—or worse still, the meaninglessness—of his actions,
O’Brien longs for the peace and finality of death and bemoans the fact that
death never overtakes him. For this reason neither death nor life seem real to
him; “I am on the border between life and death,” he explains. Echoing this,
Vanya asks, “What could be more frightening than death fleeing from you
when you are calling for her?” (PH, 77, 35–36). The hint of suicide at the end of
the novel reiterates the link between the psychological and physical terrains.
Through suicide O’Brien finds a way both to overtake death and finally to mas-
ter the urban landscape. The newfound clarity of purpose is correlated with the
city’s now transparent skyline and calm waters. Unlike O’Brien, it seems that
Savinkov continued to be haunted by this spectral horseman, returning to this
imagery in his next novel, The Dark Horse.

In 1914, when Zinaida Gippius asked Savinkov to review Bely’s then-

unfinished novel Petersburg, the terrorist-aesthete flatly refused: “I cannot say
why, but I am deeply disgusted by Bely’s novel,” he wrote, “there is falsehood,
and not a superficial one.”43 Literary scholars have suggested that, despite the
fact that they shared many mutual friends and at times moved through the
same intellectual circles, there was a great deal of hostility between Bely and
Savinkov. Some critics contend that Savinkov recognized a rather unflattering
portrait of himself in Bely’s Dudkin, while others have suggested that Petersburg
as a whole might be read as a parody of The Pale Horse.44 Whatever their dis-
agreements, we have suggested here that Savinkov and Bely raised a similar set
of questions and themes regarding terrorism’s meaning for Russia at the turn of
the century and that both authors framed these concerns spatially through the
prism of the city, a landscape marked by violence, opacity, transience, and par-
adox. Strikingly, the terrorist gaze routinely fails to penetrate these barriers and
therefore fails to order, control, and map the space.
Although the period 1902–5 has often been referred to as the Combat
Organization’s “heroic period,”45 a closer, comparative look at Savinkov’s
works—however rhetorically charged and self-aggrandizing—suggests that this
was not so, at least not without the boeviki learning a new way of “plotting” their
attacks onto the city. For them each new attempt meant charting a new course
through the urban maze, confronting and at times contributing to the deceptive
spatiality of the city. Despite his criticisms of Petersburg, Savinkov’s works thema-
tize falsehood and artificiality, as well as uncertainty and despair, through spa-
tial metaphors. The web of human thought and experience resembles for him a
jumbled and crowded city, marked by a tangled maze of streets (PH 152–53).
How Terrorists Learned to Map 169

These interconnections between political, personal, and geographical mas-

tery cast a new light on our understanding of terrorism at the turn of the twen-
tieth century and its bid for power. Scholars have certainly noted the symbiotic
relationship between terrorism and the anonymity of modern urbanism that
concealed the terrorists’ subversive activities. Less attention, however, has been
paid to the centrality of mapping in understanding how the assassins situated
and insinuated themselves in the urban space, to the ways in which they them-
selves were confounded by the very environment that aided them, and to the
way their ideological and ethical struggles were often transmuted into spatial
terms. Through our examination of Savinkov’s works, we have tried to bring
together these various strands of urban, cartographic, and literary studies and
offer a new understanding of the intersection between revolutionary terrorism
and modernism in early twentieth-century Russia.


1. Boris Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista: Pochemu ia priznal sovetskuiu vlast’, ed. I. M.
Pushkaryova (Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1990), 77. Subsequent page references are
noted in parentheses, preceded by the abbreviation RT. This essay does not analyze
Plehve’s assassination as such but explores Savinkov’s depictions of it. A classic study of
the assassination is Boris Nikolaevsky’s Aseff the Spy: Russian Terrorist and Police Stool (Gar-
den City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1934). Anna Geifman’s excellent, more recent
work departs from Nikolaevsky on several interpretative and methodological points. In
particular, Geifman suspects Nikolaevsky of letting his social-democratic leanings color
his narrative (Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution [Wil-
mington, DE: SR Books, 2000]).
2. Richard E. Rubenstein, Comrade Valentine (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 114.
3. See “The Assassination of Plehve by One of the Assassins,” The Strand Magazine
39, no. 232 (1910): 697–708; Richard B. Spence, Boris Savinkov, Renegade on the Left (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 38, 401–2. In light of popular sentiment,
Plehve’s successor, D. S. Sviatopolk-Mirsky, sentenced Sazonov to just twenty years of
hard labor.
4. Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 21, 249. For a very important reinterpreta-
tion of the history and historiography of Russian terrorism, of which the authors un-
fortunately were not aware at time of writing, see Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man
Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2009). Unlike the present study, Verhoeven’s insightful and persuasive work
focuses on the origins and early activities of Russia’s terrorists groups, primarily the
People’s Will (Narodnaia volia).
5. For a range of statistics, see Dmitry Aleksenko, “From the Experience of the
Intelligence Services of the Russian Empire in Combating Terrorists,” in High Impact
Terrorism: Proceedings from a Russian-American Workshop, ed. Committee on Confronting
Terrorism in Russia, Office for Central Europe and Eurasia Development, Security, and
Cooperation, National Research Council in Cooperation with the Russian Academy of
170   and       

Sciences (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002), 73, 69–70; Geifman, Thou
Shalt Kill, 21; Iain Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St. Petersburg,
1906–1914, Studia Historica 67 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002), 73, 246.
6. The grand duke explained that both Plehve’s murder as well as the reformist at-
titude of his successor, Sviatopolk-Mirsky, spelled out autocracy’s demise. He is quoted
in Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 132. For other examples, see V. Piskunov, ed., Vospo-
minaniia ob Andree Belom (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 86.
7. Andrey Bely, O Bloke: vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki, rechi, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Mos-
cow: Avtograf, 1997), 102.
8. Several of Bely’s characters, including Dudkin, Nikolay Ableukhov, and Lippan-
chenko, bear a striking resemblance to the real-life conspirators Savinkov, Sazonov, and
Azef. Although Bely was also likely influenced by Savinkov’s accounts of the assassina-
tions of Plehve and of Grand Duke Sergey, the link between Ableukhov and Plehve is
particularly strong. At times, the narrator of Petersburg even confuses the two officials,
pausing in front of a painting crowning the entryway to Ableukhov’s office to ask:
“And—the portrait? That is [. . .] Who is ‘he’? The senator? Apollon Apollonovich
Ableukhov? But no: Vyacheslav Konstantinovich . . . But what about him, Apollon
Apollonovich?” (Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E.
Malmstad [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978], 50, 82, 163, 636).
9. Ibid., 13–14.
10. Gerald Janeck, ed., Andrey Bely: A Critical Review (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1975), 122.
11. Boris Savinkov, Kon’ blednyi. Vsadnik po imeni smert’ (St. Petersburg: AMFORA,
2004). Subsequent page references are noted in parentheses, preceded by the abbreva-
tion PH. An English-language edition also exists; see Savinkov [Ropshin, pseud.], The
Pale Horse, trans. Z. Vengerova (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1919).
12. On the publication history of these works, see Spence, Boris Savinkov, 92–94,
401–2. Apparently, Gippius even chose the novel’s title. See Temira Pachmuss, Zinaida
Hippius: An Intellectual Profile (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1971), 137.
13. The novel contains nearly identical conversations between the main terrorists,
Azef, Sazonov, Savinkov, and Ivan Kalyaev, as the memoir. Also, many of the ideas and
concerns, which Savinkov identifies as his own in the memoir, are attributed to different
characters in the novel. Plehve and the grand duke (as well as the plots against them)
were intimately connected in the minds of the boeviki, and Savinkov cited a few of their
meetings and conversations to underscore how they were in cahoots politically. See
Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 44, 60, 66–67, 82–83, 131–32.
14. Although scholars agree that there is no singular definition of “terrorism,” the
emphasis on publicity generally is considered one of its defining features. See David J.
Whittaker, Terror and Terrorism in the Contemporary World (London: Routledge, 2004), 62,
91–95; and Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14–25, 41–43. On the symbolic aspects of
terrorism, see Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies,
Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 25, 28–30; and Richard W.
Leeman, The Rhetoric of Terrorism and Counterterrorism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991),
15–17. For a discussion of Pisacane’s phrase, see Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed,’
and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in Social Protest, Violence, and
How Terrorists Learned to Map 171

Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard
Hirschfeld (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 201–29.
15. Comparatively speaking, the memoirist’s description of the grand duke’s
murder is marred by fewer mishaps because, as Savinkov explains, the boeviki learned a
great deal from Plehve’s case. Although The Pale Horse also supposedly tells the story of
the grand duke’s assassination, the novel recounts numerous failed attempts so that the
spirit of the text more closely resembles the memoir’s account of Plehve’s assassination
and not of the grand duke’s (Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 99–101).
16. One recent example is Lynn Ellen Patyk’s excellent dissertation, which cogently
analyzes the centrality of heroic martyrdom, self-invention, and Byronism to Russia’s
revolutionary terrorists. She argues convincingly for The Pale Horse as a prime example
of modernist life-creation. See Patyk, “‘The Double-Edged Sword of Word and Deed’:
Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture” (PhD diss., Stanford Univer-
sity, 2005), 100–102.
17. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New
York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 13.
18. Our thinking about how maps can function as political tools for the expression
or preservation of power has been shaped by Mark Monmonier, Mapping It Out: Expos-
itory Cartography for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), x; David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2001), ix–x; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 184,
163–64.
19. Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1996), 88, 90, 99.
20. Neither did O’Brien. This is another detail that Savinkov took from the Plehve
assassination and inserted into that of the grand duke’s. Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista,
57–59, and Kon’ blednyi, 107–8.
21. Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 47.
22. Savinkov, Kon’ blednyi, 93; Edward H. Judge, Plehve: Repression and Reform in Impe-
rial Russia, 1902–1904 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1983), 233.
23. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 221–24. Here we refer to Réne Descartes’ Discourse on
Method (1637), where he discusses the ideal city as geometrically unified and planned to
be perfectly proportionate.
24. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 223. On “mapping flows,” see also Monmonier, Map-
ping It Out, 189–98.
25. Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, 3; Harvey, Spaces of Capital, ix–x.
26. Patyk, “The Double-Edged Sword,” 207–75.
27. Nigel Thrift, “A Hyperactive World,” Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the
World, 2nd ed., ed. Ronald John Johnston, Peter James Taylor, and Michael Watts
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 29–34, 41–42. Thrift mentions print, money,
post, cartography, and telecommunications as examples of such immutable mobiles.
28. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 111–14. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,”
trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 23–24.
29. De Certeau, Practice, 112.
172   and       

30. Here we have in mind Benjamin’s characterization of the railway station as a

“sacred, cultic site” and the train as a cathedral in the new modern religion of progress.
This theme is compellingly discussed in Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter
Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 129–31.
31. Our analysis here is informed by Gary R. Jahn, “The Image of the Railroad in
Anna Karenina,” The Slavic and East European Journal 25, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 4.
32. Savinkov, Kon’ blednyi, 62–64. In some later editions of the novel, X is identified as
Kremlin Palace (V. Ropshin [B. Savinkov], Kon’ blednyi [ Munich: Neimanis, 1974], 39).
33. Aileen Kelly, “Self-Censorship and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1905–1914,”
Slavic Review 46, no. 2 (1987): 201. The Combat Organization devoted extensive re-
sources to technical innovation. One way that the imperial government attempted to
quell terrorist activity was by controlling the flow of materials for explosives into the
country. As a result, the PSR procured supplies itself; operated secret chemical labora-
tories in Kharkov, Saratov, and abroad; and always kept official “party engineers” on
staff (Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 42–43, 54, 94–95; Kon’ blednyi, 100–101).
34. Pis’ma Azefa: 1893–1917, ed. D. B. Pavlov and Z. I. Peregudova (Moscow: Terra,
1994), 5; Rubenstein, Comrade Valentine, 95, 120–21.
35. O’Brien echoes this sentiment, likening his state to being in an iron cage (Savin-
kov, Kon’ blednyi, 91).
36. See L. K. Dolgopolov “Tvorcheskaia istoriia i istoriko-literaturnoe znachenie romana
A. Belogo ‘Peterburg,’” appendix to Andrey Bely, Peterburg (St. Petersburg: Kristall, 1999),
920. Bely also considered other titles such as The Admiralty Needle.
37. Also see Nikolajewsky, Aseff the Spy, 70. Bely casts doubt on the identities of
carriage and cab drivers in his text. In chapter 1, e.g., we find in a grimy restaurant “an
idle sweating stalwart with a coachman’s beard, a blue jacket, and blacked boots”—a
description that stops short of saying that the “stalwart” is actually a coachman (see
Petersburg, 17–18). In the same passage of the Russian text, Bely refers to the coachman as
a syshchik, or “detective.”
38. Jahn, “Image of the Railroad,” 1.
39. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans.
Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1997), 41. Here, we owe an intellectual debt to Tom
McDonough, “The Crimes of the Flâneur,” October 102 (Autumn 2002): 101–5.
40. Benjamin, Baudelaire, 39.
41. McDonough, “Crimes of the Flâneur,” 101–5, 113. Judith Walkowitz similarly
observed that terrorists and serial killers posed as flâneurs in nineteenth-century Lon-
don. She interprets this move as part of the shift away from bourgeois domination of
London, a sign of the city’s growing underbelly, which “reworked the dominant literary
mappings of London” in accordance with its own sociopolitical aims (Walkowitz, City of
Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992], 11, 16–17, 25, 41).
42. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected
Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: SAGE, 1997), 176–77.
43. This letter is dated February 4, 1914, and is quoted in Patyk, “‘The Double-
Edged Sword,” 276. Patyk suggests that Savinkov’s contempt for Bely’s novel may have
been the result of its depiction of the Dudkin-Lippanchenko relationship and what that
might suggest about the Savinov-Azef dynamic, and of Bely’s novel “demolishing the
How Terrorists Learned to Map 173

heroic culture of the Russian intelligentsia” as well as the image of the terrorist as hero-
martyr “through parody and satire” (277).
44. See Dolgopolov, “Tvorcheskaia istoriia,” 921; Patyk, “‘The Double-Edged
Sword,” 276–77; Spence, Boris Savinkov, 52; and Andrey Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed.
A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 36, 65, 72. Of course, Bely
also drew traits and biographical details from other real-life individuals in his character-
ization of Dudkin. For instance, he incorporated some elements from Grigory Gershuni’s
life, including his legendary 1906 escape from Akatuy Prison in a barrel of cabbage.
45. There is a discussion of this periodization in Manfred Hildermeier, “The Ter-
rorist Strategies of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in Russia, 1900–1914,” in Social
Protest, 80–87.
 6
The Enchanted Masquerade
Alexander Blok’s The Puppet Show
from the Stage to the Streets

         

On December 30, 1906, the Vera Komissarzhevskaya Theater at 39 Ofitser-

skaya Street was packed with an audience awaiting a scandal. The event was
the premiere of Alexander Blok’s play The Puppet Show (Balaganchik), directed by
avant-garde star-on-the-rise Vsevolod Meyerhold, who also played the lead
role. Many years later the poet Sergey Auslender recalled the unruly curtain
call in detail: “The auditorium was in an uproar as though it were a real battle.
Solid, respectable citizens were ready to come to blows; whistles and roars of
anger alternated with piercing howls conveying a mixture of fervor, defiance,
anger, and despair.”1 The play was met with equal furor in the press; the thea-
ter critic Alexander Kugel gave the following account of the production: “Mr.
Blok parodies everything and approaches everything—including stupidity—
seriously. Perhaps it is because of this that what generally emerges is a serious
stupidity, at which the public had every right to be angry.”2 What was it about
this “fairy play,” as Blok called it, which was no more than forty minutes long,
that caused such outrage?
Some audience members were simply offended by the play’s incomprehen-
sibility. One spectator recalled a cry of outrage from the audience: “No, you
explain to me what on earth that was!”3 The Puppet Show is indeed a difficult
play to follow. It begins with a tense exchange between Pierrot, a figure from

174
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma s q u e r a de 175

the Italian commedia dell’arte, and a gloomy group of enshrouded mystics.4

Both parties are awaiting the arrival of the beautiful Columbine; Pierrot claims
that she is his fiancée, while the mystics maintain that she is actually Death.
When she finally appears, Columbine runs off with Pierrot’s rival, Harlequin.
In the meantime, a small puppet theater (to which the title refers) provides the
backdrop for the encounters of three pairs of lovers in masquerade costumes.
Harlequin returns alone, having discovered that Columbine is made of card-
board, and attempts suicide. Finally, a character called the Author emerges, at-
tempting to reconcile his star-crossed lovers, but just as he is about to join their
hands, the scenery is pulled up to the ceiling and the lovelorn Pierrot is left
alone on the stage.
Others were offended for more ideological reasons. By juxtaposing the
mystics’ pursuit of Death with the antics of Pierrot and Harlequin competing
for a cardboard Columbine, Blok undermined the symbolist conception of the
theater as a temple as well as his own exaltation of the Divine Feminine, thus
alienating his literary allies. Some symbolist poets even felt that Blok had mali-
ciously caricatured them in his depiction of the mystics; the play drove quite a
wedge between Blok and Andrey Bely, who referred to it as blasphemous.5
Blok also incited anger through his playful mockery of established theatrical
conventions—an actor who is injured cries out that he is bleeding cranberry
juice, Harlequin jumps out of a window that is revealed to be only a paper
background—and the artifice of the production is further highlighted by the
presence of the small puppet theater in the middle of the stage.
While there is much to say about the play’s innovative modernist aesthetic,
and it has indeed been insightfully treated by many scholars, I will turn my
attention instead to the production’s equally fascinating life beyond the stage:
how it intertwined with the personal and textual lives of Blok and his entour-
age, as played out against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg.
This essay traces the routes inscribed over the city by the main players in the
production, not only in the act of bringing The Puppet Show to the stage but also
in their transformation of the wintry capital into a larger stage for their own
personal dramas. The whimsical yet anxious tones of the public theatrical per-
formance echoed throughout the private lives of those involved in its staging,
as the aesthetic of the play suffused the masked balls, soirees, triangular love
affairs, and midnight strolls of the artists. In bringing the public aspect of the
masquerade into their private lives, which were then displayed in the public
realm of the city, Blok and his fellow artists reinterpreted and reinscribed the
open-air tradition of the puppet theater within the masquerade-infused culture
of early twentieth-century Petersburg.
176         

Moving beyond this conception of the city as stage, the city for Blok was an
impetus to textual production, much as it was for Bely and many others before
him. For Blok, a poet no less sensitive to the importance of urban space, it was
the city’s landmarks and ambiance during these winter strolls that formed the
basis for his 1907 collection of poetry The Snow Mask (Snezhnaia maska). Tracing
Blok’s navigation of the city, both in his life and his art of this period, allows us
to pinpoint his specific aesthetic within the context of the Petersburg text and
the tradition of the urban poet, as he creatively engaged with the ever-present
oppositions of real and illusory, public and private.
The Puppet Show, which Blok adapted from his poem of the same name,
made its way to the stage amid a crossing of paths of some of the most promi-
nent artists of the period.6 It began when the celebrated actress Vera Komissar-
zhevskaya decided to seek new directions for her theater, both figuratively and
literally. She signed on the accomplished actor Vsevolod Meyerhold as the new
director and moved her troupe from their existing theater in the Passazh Build-
ing on Nevsky Prospect to a new location at 39 Ofitserskaya Street (not far from
Blok’s last apartment). While renovations were underway, Komissarzhevskaya
hosted several gatherings at the Latvian Musical Society at 30 Angliysky Pros-
pect, which was around the corner from the new theater, in order to introduce
the troupe to the artists and poets of St. Petersburg.7
The first meeting was held on October 14, 1906, and those attending
included Blok, Fyodor Sologub, Sergey Gorodetsky, Georgy Chulkov, Vya-
cheslav Ivanov, Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal, and Mikhail Kuzmin, as well as art-
ists Leon Bakst, Sergey Sudeykin, Konstantin Somov, and Nikolay Sapunov.8
Kuzmin would write the music for the play, and Sapunov create the sets. For
entertainment, Komissarzhevskaya sang, and several poets, including Blok,
read their work by candlelight as the guests sipped mulled wine.
It was at this soiree that Blok met the actress Natalya Volokhova, with
whom he fell in love during the winter of 1906–7. She became an integral cast
member both of The Puppet Show and of Blok’s private drama. Volokhova re-
calls their meeting:
Alexander Alexandrovich [Blok] was immediately surrounded by a large group
of young people. He was bombarded with questions, beset with sandwiches,
tea, cakes, wine. He stood looking a little overcome by such an enthusiastic
reception, smiling meekly and shifting from one foot to the other. Alexander
Alexandrovich was dressed in a long black frock coat, which I think he was
wearing for the first time, and was obviously feeling very much the hero of the
occasion: pleased, but a little embarrassed too. Of course, there were requests
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma sq u e r a de 177

to recite [. . .] Alexander Alexandrovich recited well, with a sense of music, in a

rather hollow voice, with dignity, even solemnity.9

The performative aspect of these evenings, which were centered on poetic or

musical recitals, continued throughout the season, but it also extended beyond
these performances in the literal sense of the word. Blok, the well-known public
figure of the solemn poet in a frock coat, was just as much in costume as an
actor in a play.
Shortly thereafter, in November 1906, Komissarzhevskaya’s new theater
opened its doors, and by December, rehearsals were underway for The Puppet
Show. Blok was present at almost all of them, often behind the curtain or in the
dressing rooms backstage. He developed a close friendship with three actresses:
Volokhova, Evgeniya Munt, and Valentina Verigina. During these rehearsals
and visits to the theater in December, Blok’s infatuation with Volokhova be-
came public. Verigina recalls:

Blok called in on us in our dressing room as was now his habit. When the break
came to an end, we saw him to the head of the stairs, and Volokhova remained
standing at the top to watch him go. Suddenly Blok turned and took a few inde-
cisive paces toward her, then stepped back again, and, finally, putting his foot
on the first stair, said shyly and solemnly that he had just understood the mean-
ing of his forebodings, his confusion of the last months. “I have just seen it in
your eyes; I have just this moment realized that it is they and they alone which
bring me to this theater.”10

The dressing room and the threshold of the stairway thus became for Blok
spaces not only of physical but also of emotional transformation. This dramatic
affair (since Blok was already married to Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva) il-
lustrates the echo of the intense romantic turmoil of the play in the lives of
those who participated in its production.
Blok’s was not the only affair to take shape around the theater. As the prep-
arations for The Puppet Show continued, Kuzmin fell in love just as dramatically,
almost at first sight, with the artist Sudeykin, whom he met through his work
with the theater. In his poem “At the Theater” (“V teatre,” written November
1906–January 1907), Kuzmin memorialized the same fateful staircase and the
interior of the theater:

Entrances, hallways, dressing rooms,

The soaring staircase, half-darkened;
178         

Conversations, stubborn arguments,

Immodest curtains on the doors.
[. . .]
Long hours of waiting,
Gossip with the little actresses,
Wandering through the dressing rooms, the foyer,
Or in the workshop, or behind the curtains.

You come completely unexpectedly,

Loudly clicking along the corridor—
Oh, how much meaning is given
To that walk, smile, gaze!
How sweet it is to be among all those kissed.
With a seemingly heartless greeting,
To hear with a fettered heart
Those dear indifferent words.
How I love the dampened walls
Of the auditorium,
The broadcloths on stage gone gray,
The sting of jealousy!11

Kuzmin’s poem highlights the liminal spaces of the theater, which reflect
the fluid boundaries in the relationships of those who spent time there. These
thresholds, such as the stairway and the curtain, indicate the movement between
public and private space, and for Kuzmin and Blok, between the concealment
and revelation of love. As this poem suggests, Kuzmin’s relationship was as
problematic as Blok’s, both of them uncannily similar to the troubled romance
in The Puppet Show; the poet learned just a few days before the premiere of the
play that Sudeykin was engaged to Olga Glebova.
Beyond these ill-fated romances that echoed the thematics of the play, its
aesthetic of masks and double identities was recreated in a more literal way in
the lives of those who staged it: in the masquerade ball held on the night of the
premiere. During the intermission of the play, the actresses passed out invita-
tions to the party from “the paper ladies,” who had purportedly just arrived by
balloon from the moon; the invitees were the cast and all those involved with
the play’s production, as well as other poets and artists who had been part of
this inner circle since Komissarzhevskaya’s receptions in the fall (Verigina,
324). The ball, held at the home of the actress Vera Ivanova, was a continua-
tion of the emotionally fraught masquerade of lovers in Blok’s play. Transform-
ing the apartment into their own private dressing room, the actresses gave the
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma s q u e r a de 179

men masks to wear, and the ladies dressed in ball gowns made of colorful crepe
paper. Some wore tiaras or carried swords, like those of the lovers in the play.
Volokhova even recalls putting makeup on Blok as they were all getting into
costume, and Blok describes this in the poem “They Are Reading Verses”
(“Oni chitaiut stikhi”) in The Snow Mask, a title that again highlights the impor-
tance of masks for Blok:

She penciled in my red brows,

Looked down and said:
“I didn’t know:
You could also be beautiful,
You dark knight, you!”12

The fairy-tale figure of the knight, who made an appearance in the costume
of one of the masquerading lovers in The Puppet Show, was also a fixture in the
poems of The Snow Mask. Beyond the knight’s charming archaism, the masks,
costumes, and focus on role-playing suggest a major concern of the symbolist
poets: the fluidity between reality and illusion, the distance between the real
and ideal. This tension is at the center of The Puppet Show, and it also appears in
Blok’s earlier poetry, which often stressed masks and the idea of removing the
veil to discover what lay beneath it, both figuratively and, in the case of his
famous poem “The Stranger” (“Neznakomka”), literally.
Fittingly, this tension was also borne out in Blok’s private life. As his rela-
tionship with Volokhova progressed, it seemed that he was placing a metaphys-
ical veil over her real existence; she was increasingly frustrated with his treat-
ment of her as an ideal female figure rather than as a real woman (Verigina,
330). Her comment to him on the distinction between fantasy and reality was
memorialized in “They Are Reading Verses”:

How strange were the speeches of the masks!

Did you understand them? God knows!
You know for certain: in books there are fairytales,
But in life—there is only prose.
(Blok, 245)

Despite Volokhova’s objection to the privileging of the poetic over the prosaic,
the ideal over the real, Verigina recalls Blok himself as being somehow more
symbolic than concrete at the party: “In the half-darkness among the masks, in
the midst of the circular dance of the paper ladies, Blok seemed unreal, like
some kind of symbol” (Verigina, 325). For the poet and his entourage, both en-
sconced in the transformative space of the masquerade, the masks were not
180         

only a means of taking on another identity but also a continual means of pass-
ing into another reality, reaching beyond the physical into the metaphysical.
While Volokhova found Blok’s poetic transformation of her to be suffocat-
ing and preferred the “prose of life” to his fairy tales, there was also prose gen-
erated from the events of the season in a literal sense. We have already seen
these evenings recorded in several memoirs, but the excitement of the masque-
rade ball was also recorded by Kuzmin in his story “The Cardboard House”
(“Kartonnyi domik,” 1907):

The women [. . .] had all agreed to wear multicolored costumes of a single

design, made out of fine paper, held together by delicate little colored ribbons,
and half-masks; they were mysterious, fresh and young in the light of the
colored lanterns. They danced, whirled about, sat down on the floor, sang,
drank the wine which gleamed red in long wine-glasses, making merry some-
how gently and noiselessly in the half-lit room.13

Just as Blok recreated the ball in his poetry, so too did Kuzmin in his story
which details the experiences of several thinly disguised participants in the
festivities. It is not insignificant that the dresses, both at the ball and in the
story, were made of thin and flimsy paper, echoing the cardboard of the play’s
Columbine (as did Kuzmin’s title) and highlighting the blurred boundaries
between reality and illusion, permanent and ephemeral, material and sym-
bolic. While the costumes looked beautiful, they would disintegrate as surely
as a snowflake would melt. The maskers at the party carried on the illusion
by playfully dispensing with the usual formal address, instead speaking to one
another using the informal ty and creating the impression of real relationships
that, beyond the merry revelry and poetic significance with which they were
invested, would prove to be nothing more than cardboard and crepe paper. As
with Columbine and her lovers, when the weight of the symbolic was placed
upon real human relationships, they could not help but fold under the pressure.
At the masquerade ball, however, this inevitability was not yet realized by
the participants. Carrying the stage with them into the ballroom, they unwit-
tingly recreated the troubled love triangle of The Puppet Show. Blok abandoned
his wife for Volokhova, while his wife began an affair with the poet Georgy
Chulkov. In an explicit act of symbolic role-playing, Lyubov silently removed
her necklace and placed it on Volokhova’s neck, as a sign of the actress’s as-
sumption of the role of the poet’s muse.14 Blok’s collection The Snow Mask was
indeed dedicated to Volokhova. He wrote the following inscription in her copy:
“To the tall woman in black with the winged eyes, enamored of the lights and
darkness of my snowy city” (Volokhova, 373).
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma s q u e r a de 181

These artists were not the only ones for whom the masquerade ball held a
great significance, however. Masquerades were a large part of the social life of
turn-of-the-century Petersburg, and they had laid their roots in the imperial cap-
ital much earlier, in the coronation festivities of tsars and tsarinas spanning from
Peter I to Nicholas II, as traced by Richard S. Wortman in the seminal study Sce-
narios of Power. But the masquerade was also an event in and of itself, independent
of a coronation; the imperial masquerade ball held at the Hermitage Theater in
the Winter Palace in 1903 is a prime example. The court came dressed in elab-
orate seventeenth-century attire, with Nicholas II himself dressed as Tsar Alexey
Mikhailovich and Alexandra as his wife Maria Miloslavskaya. The lavish gath-
ering, held twice in the span of a week, included dancing and a performance of
Pushkin’s historical drama Boris Godunov, thus creating a dual space of perform-
ance, as both audience and actors donned costumes and played roles.15
And yet the impulse to masquerade extended beyond the imperial court.
Costume balls were also very popular as a form of entertainment for those of a
lower status in the early twentieth century; they were frequently held at thea-
ters geared toward a more common audience. During the run of The Puppet
Show, lowbrow theaters, such as the Apollo and the Nevsky Farce, held mas-
querade balls stretching until three or four in the morning for small entrance
fees. The allure of the masquerade thus permeated the imagination of the pop-
ulation of Petersburg, from the imperial court to the working class, allowing all
to participate in the play of masks, costumes, and dual identities.
Just as Blok and his friends from the theater were not the only ones to par-
ticipate in masquerades, they were also not the only ones to write about them.
In fact, one can hardly consider them without recalling another figure in a mas-
querade costume, who is also caught in a tempestuous love triangle: Nikolay
Apollonovich in Bely’s Petersburg. While Nikolay’s reasons for donning his red
domino are different from those among Blok’s circle, his experience is nonethe-
less remarkably similar to theirs. The masquerade begins early in the novel, as
Nikolay excitedly opens a box from the tailor:

He cut the string with great fuss. He lifted the top and took out of the box: a
half-mask with a black lace beard, and after the mask, a luxuriant bright red
domino with folds that rustled. Soon he was standing before the mirror, all
satiny and red, holding the miniature half-mask over his face. The black lace of
the beard fell away and back onto his shoulders, forming a fantastic wing on
each side, right and left.
After this masquerade, Nikolay Apollonovich, an extremely satisfied expres-
sion on his face, first put the red domino and then the black half-mask back in
the box.16
Nicholas II in costume for the 1903 Imperial Masquerade Ball at the Winter
Palace (Al’bom kostiumirovannogo bala v Zimnern dvortse v fevrale 1903g. [1904] )
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma s q u e r a de 183

Guests at a masquerade ball at the home of Countess Kleinmikhel in December 1913 (Stolitsa i
usad’ba)

While Nikolay has yet to present himself in public, it is significant that the very
act of putting on the costume constitutes a masquerade for him. Gazing at him-
self in the mirror provides an instantaneous doubling effect: his room has be-
come a dressing room, a space of transformation. Of course the costume is not
merely for Nikolay’s amusement but is an integral part of his incognito pursuit
of Sofia Likhutina, the frivolous wife of the stolid Sergey Likhutin. Notably, this
literary love triangle is not unrelated to Blok; it was inspired by the very real
crisis that occurred when Bely fell in love with Blok’s wife. The denouement
of this affair, Lyubov’s refusal of Bely, took place only a short time before Blok
began working on The Puppet Show.
Both Blok’s play and Bely’s novel abound with costumes and shifting iden-
tities: The Puppet Show with its masked lovers, and Petersburg with characters that
seem to alternate costumes rather than remove them. Before we see Nikolay in
his red domino, we have already seen him in another costume, his robe: “A
dressing gown began to appear on Nikolay Apollonovich. Tartar slippers were
introduced. A skullcap made its appearance. Thus was a brilliant student trans-
formed into an Oriental” (Bely, 27). Aside from this Eastern-inspired costume,
Nikolay’s face is repeatedly described as resembling an ancient mask, even
when he is wearing neither of his costumes (30, 43). The same patterns holds
184         

true for Sofia, who, when not donning her Madame Pompadour costume for
the ball, can be found in a Japanese kimono, a feminine version of Nikolay’s
khalat. Both characters bring the masquerade into their daily lives by wearing
their costumes not only within the space of the ball but also in their homes and
in Nikolay’s case, in his movement through the city.
As with Blok and his companions, the costume ball in Bely’s novel is a
transgressive event, one that Sofia’s husband has forbidden her to attend. As
the ball begins, the costumes of the masqueraders fill the room: “buffoon-
harlequins, señoritas, and oriental ladies flashed their eyes from behind vel-
vet masks. [. . .] A red domino kept rushing around, searching for someone,
extending his black mask, below which rustled a thick fan of lace” (47). Only
in this costume could Nikolay pursue Sofia, and only in her costume could she
respond to his attentions while remaining innocent of wrongdoing. It is sig-
nificant that amid this carnivalesque scene we again see the harlequins, com-
media dell’arte figures, which further link this masquerade to the figures in
Blok’s play and indicate the modernist fascination with the Italian theatrical
tradition.
Bely’s ball is also a conduit to an otherworldly experience. Sofia sees a
double version of her husband there, and she is later accompanied by what
seems to be a third version of him, dressed in a white domino, uttering several
cryptic phrases and then disappearing (111, 118–20). This doubling, or tripling,
is in fact quadrupling, since we later find out that Sergey Likhutin has been at
home during the ball. Nikolay’s experience of the real being replaced by the
ephemeral is reminiscent of Blok’s masquerade: “he marveled, as one marvels
in a dream: at the emergence of a reflection into the real world. He himself
looked at everything that existed as wavering reflections; as for the reflections,
they took him merely for a ghost who had emerged from the other world” (109).
Blok became some kind of symbol at his masquerade, and Nikolay becomes not
a man but a ghost among costumed reflections of actual people.
The costume, and the mask specifically, has yet another vital function in
Bely’s novel: it is intertwined with cerebral play, the generative source of the
narrative. As cerebral play creates “thought images, which at once became in-
carnate in this spectral world” of Apollon Apollonovich’s mind, it also creates
the narrative of the novel itself as a product of the “author’s fantasy” (20, 35).
Our narrator reveals to us that “cerebral play is only a mask. Under way be-
neath this mask is the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us” (35). The
mask hides the mysterious elements that spin the tale of the novel, creating
events that we can never be sure actually happened, worlds the existence of
which we cannot verify.
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma s q u e r a de 185

The narrative impetus of the mask for cerebral play is paralleled in a

more literal sense as Nikolay gallivants around the streets and bridges of the
city, inspiring a flood of newspaper reports, the accuracy of which even the
narrator cannot certify:
“Daily Chronicle.”
October 1. According to the eyewitness account of a doctor’s assistant, Miss
N.N., we report on a puzzling event. On the evening of October 1, Miss N.N.
was walking by the Chernyshev Bridge. There, by the bridge, she noticed a
strange spectacle: on the bridge over the canal a red domino was dancing. The
face of the domino was covered by a black mask.
October 2. According to eyewitness accounts of the schoolteacher Miss M.M.,
we inform our respected readers of a puzzling event. The teacher Miss M.M.
was giving her morning lesson. The school windows looked out on the street.
Suddenly outside the window a pillar of dust began swirling. The teacher and
her lively young charges rushed to the window. Imagine the confusion of the
class and the schoolmistress, when a red domino, from the midst of the dust it
had raised, glued a black mask to the window. Classes were suspended in the
O.O. School. (37–38)

The domino creates what is literally identified as a spectacle, as Nikolay dances

on bridges or stirs up clouds of dust before the children watching him from
their school’s windows. Even the initials of the eyewitnesses, always double
letters, reflect the dual identity of Nikolay, as the domino transforms his char-
acter. These public spectacles confirm that Nikolay has taken his private mas-
querade, which began as he looked into the mirror in his room and continued
with his appearance at the ball, into the public space of the city itself, turning its
bridges and streets into a stage for his costumed performances.
Still, we must mark one important distinction between Blok’s and Bely’s
masquerades. As these alarmist newspaper accounts suggest, there is undoubt-
edly a more sinister underpinning to Nikolay’s public masquerade; the costume
not only allows him to clandestinely communicate with Sofia but also provides
a mask for his identity and involvement with the revolutionary circle to which
he has promised allegiance. Indeed, the terror inspired by the figure of the red
domino has much to do with the tense political undercurrents felt throughout
the city on the eve of the 1905 revolution.17
In Blok’s case the public masquerading was much more light-hearted
but no less tied to a specific space: the cityscape of bridges, canals, and snowy
streets. Given the captivating winter landscape of St. Petersburg, it seems only
fitting that Blok spent much of his time with Volokhova during their affair
walking in the city. The actress describes these walks in her memoirs:
186         

Often, after the theater, we went for long walks, and Alexander Alexandrovich
introduced me to “his city,” as he called it. Passing the deserted Mars Field, we
would take the Trinity Bridge and gaze enthralled into the endless chain of
streetlamps, set like burning fires along the river and fading away at last into an
infinity of darkness. We would walk further and stroll about the outskirts of the
city, along the embankments, along the canals, crossing bridges. [. . .] Reality
was so intermingled with the invention, the dreams of the poet, that I voluntar-
ily lost the boundaries of the real and entered with awe and enchantment into
this world of poetry that I had never known before. I had the feeling that I was
receiving this extraordinary, legendary city as a gift at the hands of the poet.
(Volokhova, 373)

Blok’s city, although filled with recognizable landmarks, functions here as a

conduit into another realm, that of his poetic imagination. Against this back-
drop Blok and Volokhova, even without their costumes, played the roles of the
masked lovers from The Puppet Show, recreating the play’s blurred boundaries
between reality and illusion (not incidentally, Volokhova lived a few houses
away from the Komissarzhevsky Theater, at 45 Ofitserskaya Street). The city
itself was transformed into text; the concreteness of the streets and bridges,
hidden under a “costume” of snow, became an ethereal “world of poetry” for
Blok and his lover.
This public performative aspect of their interaction, however, was already
inscribed into the subject matter of The Puppet Show and into the city of Peters-
burg itself. The title of the play refers literally to a balagan, an open-air puppet
booth that was often part of public festivals in Petersburg. Popular as early as
the eighteenth century, they often took commedia dell’arte figures as their sub-
ject matter and actually traveled throughout the city on wagons, transforming
city space into performative space. The audiences were just as mobile, crowd-
ing around the booths and mingling among other attractions, such as ice hills
and merry-go-rounds.18 Even the name for these festivals, narodnoe gulianie (from
the verb guliat’, “to stroll”) , literally “popular revels,” reflects the centrality of
movement and of outdoor space. These public carnivals, held at Christmas
and Easter, were put on at the very Mars Field through which Blok and Volo-
khova walked, a modern-day Pierrot with his half-real and half-illusory Colum-
bine.19 Although the city fairs were banned in 1896 due to concerns about
crowd congestion, there is a sense in which Blok and Volokhova reinterpreted
and reinscribed the commedia dell’arte tradition into the urban space through
their strolls, with the city as both their stage and their audience.20
Their romance was as inseparable from the city as the balagan performances
were from public urban space. Even after the carnivals had been dismantled,
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma s q u e r a de 187

the antics of Pierrot and Harlequin could be taken in on street corners where
itinerant puppeteers set up their booths.21 These performances, while dis-
dained by the cultural elite in the nineteenth century, drew audiences of both
upper and lower classes, and by the early twentieth century, the carnivalesque
subject matter had become a source of inspiration for the modernists of Blok’s
circle. Their inclusion of the artistically unsophisticated balagan into their work
is a key illustration of the unification of high and low that they embraced.
Alongside these outdoor “performances,” The Puppet Show continued its run
at the theater during the winter months, and the evening gatherings of Blok
and the other artists went on in various spaces throughout the city. They met at
Vyacheslav Ivanov’s famed Tower near the Tauride Gardens; at the popular
restaurant Vienna on the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Gorokhovaya
Streets; or at the apartments of the Bloks on the Petersburg Side, or the Meyer-
holds, at 18 Alekseevskaya Street, close to the theater. Their gatherings often
featured poetry recitals and discussions of literature.22 For some participants,
however, the travel to and from these places was just as artistically important as
the meetings themselves. Verigina remembers one such occasion as representa-
tive of their significance as a whole:

Blok, Auslender, Meyerhold, and Gorodetsky escorted four ladies—Volokhova,

Ivanova, Munt, and me (we lived in the neighborhood of Ofitserskaya) [. . .] It
was quiet and snowy. We walked through the spectral city, across the canals,
along the fantastic bridges of the Venice of the North, and probably ourselves
appeared as specters walking about in the Venetian bautta masks of the past.
Our life at that time also existed on some unreal plane—as if in a game. After
The Puppet Show and the Evening of the Paper Ladies, the masks made our meet-
ings marvelous, and we didn’t leave the magical circle for two winter seasons,
until we finally parted. (Verigina, 331)

Verigina hits upon a theme here that roots the public performance of their win-
ter masquerade within the very history of the city itself. When it was founded by
Peter the Great in 1703, Petersburg was planned with canals in imitation of Am-
sterdam. Although many of them had to be filled in due to their unsuitability for
Russia’s climate, the city became known as the Venice of the North for its many
canals and bridges, and this is an essential part of the city’s mythos. As Verigina
suggests, Petersburg’s association with its Italian counterpart also makes it an
ideal location for the unfolding of its own carnivalesque masquerade. Indeed,
Yury Lotman argues that theatricalized space has been part of the city since its
inception; he posits that Petersburg is divided into stage and wings (stsenicheskoe i
zakulisnoe), with the audience perpetually present.23 The Venetian aspect of the
188         

city, along with its naturally theatrical space, continued to mark it almost as a
stage set even after the revolution; Akhmatova stated that as late as 1920, her
fellow poet Mandelshtam saw the city as “half-Venice, half-theater.”24
Verigina’s “bautta masks of the past” indicate one other particularity of the
city: that it is a space that allows for multiple temporalities. We find evidence of
this in Bely’s novel and in the aesthetic that inspired it. In her treatment of the
masquerade ball in Petersburg, Colleen McQuillen identifies a palpable connec-
tion between eighteenth-century Venice and early twentieth-century Peters-
burg, one that was already manifested in the symbolist predilection for masks,
which created a space for acts of transgression against the normal strictures of
social life.25
The eighteenth-century Venetian carnival that Verigina references was a
lengthy affair, beginning at Shrovetide and stretching on, with short intervals,
for six months. It was a very public celebration, which was centered on the
open spaces of the Piazza and the Piazzetta San Marco. In his study of daily
life in eighteenth-century Venice (during which the carnival was at its peak),
Maurice Andrieux describes the significance of the same bautta mask to which
Verigina refers:
The mask or bautta was not, as elsewhere, a simple affair covering mouth and
eyes. In Venice it was a sort of enfolding cape or mantle with a black hood over
the head and shoulders, the whole surmounted by a little tricorne hat. The ac-
tual mask part is described as being “closely modelled on the white mask of clas-
sical times, its beaked outline altering the face into that of some strange bird cut
in chalk.” Perfect for its purpose, the bautta became almost a uniform for Carni-
val. From Doge to kitchenmaid, everybody wore it, man, woman and child of
every age and station. Servant-girls went masked to market, mothers carried
babies in masks in their arms, the lawyer wore a mask to plead in court.26
This type of mask and costume, so similar to the ones worn by the masked
lovers in Blok’s play and by Nikolay Apollonovich, was less a disguise for a par-
ticular event than a new identity taken on over a long period of time, an iden-
tity in which one carried out the normal duties of life, including traversing the
city in fulfilling daily routines. But as Verigina’s comment clarifies, the cos-
tumes of Blok and his circle were not always literal and physical; they were
worn in spirit, changing the masquerader’s self-conception. As such, they
brought about two transformations: those who wore them became carnival-
goers with new identities, and the wintry city through which they strolled be-
came not present-day Petersburg but Venice of the past.
Beyond serving as a space for the masquerade, the city held still another
level of significance for Blok: as a source of inspiration and subject matter for
his poetry. This trend is notable throughout his career but particularly so in the
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma s q u e r a de 189

collection The Snow Mask. On one occasion, walking the actresses home from
an evening at Sologub’s on Vasilievsky Island, Blok explained the source of the
knight in the poem, “Shadows on the Wall” (“Teni na stene”):

We crossed the Neva [. . . and] began to talk about The Snow Mask, about the
knight with dark chains on his steel hands. “I will show him to you; he is on the
Winter Palace. I used to gaze at him when I went to the university,” said Alex-
ander Alexandrovich. (Verigina, 332)

As abstract as some of Blok’s images were, in many cases they were tied to spe-
cific experiences or locations in the city. Blok took these concrete images and
transformed them into the symbolic figures of his work, giving them new life in
his verses.
Other than this knight and the occasional mention of a bridge, however,
there are not many explicitly identified landmarks of the city in The Snow Mask,
although the entirety of the action described in the collection takes place in
Petersburg. Blok depicts the city less as a concrete entity than as an ethereal
wintry aura in which his romance and his poetry take shape. It is almost as if he
has thrown a symbolic snow-woven veil over the city, perhaps the very snow
mask to which the title of the collection refers.
There is also a sense in which Blok actually uses his experience of the city as
a material from which to weave his verses. This is the metaphor that Blok uses
in the poem “Patterns of Snow” (“Snezhnaia viaz’”):

A snowy mist whirled up.

The snowdrifts lay all around.

Yes. I don’t know you.

You are captive to the pattern of my verses.

And, I weave and spin the snowy threads,

The secretly intertwining pattern.

You are not the first to give yourself to me

On this dark bridge
(Blok, 212)

It is on the bridge with Volokhova that Blok finds the raw material for his
verses; he weaves them out of the very snowflakes that whirl around them. But
what kind of city is it that forms Blok’s poetry? Both Blok’s explanation of the
knight image and his nonspecific references to Volokhova suggest that his city
is a veiled one. The spaces in the poems are known only to those who partici-
pated in these scenes; to all the rest, the coordinates of the city remain unclear.
Thus, Blok’s intimate version of his city remains concealed or, we might say,
190         

underneath a mask. It is not quite the Petersburg we have come to associate

with the iconic Petersburg text, including such easily identifiable monuments
as The Bronze Horseman or the Haymarket Square, or even the Petersburg of Pe-
tersburg, with its menacing islands, familiar bridges, and rectilinear prospects.
Nonetheless, there is clearly something in Blok’s city of the otherworldly, the
metaphysical realm of reality that Vladimir Toporov marks as a constant in de-
pictions of the city.27
We see this entry into another realm more explicitly in another poem from
The Snow Mask, “Overtaken by the Blizzard” (“Nastignutyi metel’iu”):
The snowdrift sang.
And the needles of snow pricked.
And my soul turned to ice.
You overtook me.

You threw your head back high.

You said: “Look, look,
So you will not forget
That which you love.”

And you pointed to the distant lines of the city,

To the fields snowy and blue,
To the pointless cold.

And the raised hammer of snowy whirlwinds

Threw us into the abyss, where sparks ran about,
Where timid snowflakes whirled . . .
(Blok, 217)

Blok’s city, with its distant lines and snowy fields, is a concrete one, and yet it
exists on the same plane as the “raised hammer of snowy whirlwinds,” which
throws Blok and Volokhova into an “abyss.” This landscape has two facets: the
real and the symbolic. Just as the masks at Blok’s ball created a second symbolic
identity for those who wore them, so the snowy mask covering the city contains
the symbolic world of Blok’s poetry within itself.
Almost all of the poetry in The Snow Mask reflects this conception of the
city as a liminal space, a point of entry to another plane. Not surprisingly,
Verigina recalls that there was something in the physical act of strolling
through this half-mystical space that seemed to overtake the significance of the
play itself:

How often we wandered through the streets of the snowy city [. . .] All of the
theatrical events that seemed so important in their time have grown dim in my
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma s q u e r a de 191

memory. Acting at the theater, which I loved so much, now seems to me far less
exciting and bright than that game of masks in Blok’s circle. It is true that even
at that time I did not look upon our meetings, gatherings, and strolls as mere
entertainment. There is no doubt that others too felt the significance and cre-
ative value of it all, yet nonetheless we did not realize that the charms of Blok’s
poetry almost deprived us all of our real existence, turning us into Venetian
masqueraders of the north. (Verigina, 331)

Blok and his entourage, as they assumed roles somewhere between that of
the fin-de-siècle flâneur and of the Venetian carnival masker, took their per-
formance from the small stage of the theater to the larger stage of the city itself,
and thus they found that walking through the city was a creative act in and of
itself. In this regard, Blok in particular calls to mind the quintessential urban
poet Charles Baudelaire as described by Walter Benjamin: “at certain times
Baudelaire thought his flânerie was endowed with the same dignity as the exer-
tion of his poetic powers.”28 Blok’s enchanting Petersburg in The Snow Mask
functions on a much more symbolic level than Baudelaire’s gritty Paris, but the
two poets share the understanding of strolling through the city as a means of
creative production.
Having examined the texts inspired by this wintry masquerade, including
poetry, fiction, and memoirs, let us consider this final means of textual produc-
tion that Verigina’s quote suggests: walking the city itself. Particularly apropos
here is Michel de Certeau’s description of walking through urban space as a
speech act, an instance of enunciation on the part of the walker, who chooses
his path the way that he chooses his language and makes an individual asser-
tion through the routes that he traces through space.29 In Blok’s case we can be
sure that this peripatetic act of walking through the city was a means of making
the public cityscape his own private dwelling place, a poetic means of reshap-
ing the concrete into the abstract.
By way of conclusion, let us sound the echoes of The Puppet Show and the
events that surrounded it. Blok took as a theme for his play the balagan, which
was already embedded in the world of urban theatrical performance, and
brought it back into the private realm as he recreated its masquerade-like per-
formativity in his own personal life. He then publicly memorialized both his
theatricalized relationships and his city, the backdrop that made the masque-
rade possible, in The Snow Mask. Blurring the boundaries between public and
private, stage and city, mask and true identity, the enchanted winter of 1906–7
was a crystallization of Blok’s symbolist aesthetic. Blok’s city, like his exalted
muse, is a perfect expression of his fascination with these dualities, suspended
between the images of the real and the ideal.
192         


1. Sergey Auslender, “Moi portrety. Meyerkhold,” Teatr i muzyka 1–2 (1923): 427–
28. Translated by Edward Braun and published in Braun’s The Theater of Meyerhold: Revo-
lution on the Modern Stage (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1979), 72.
2. A. Kugel, “Teatral’nye zametki,” Teatr i iskusstvo 1 (1907): 18. All translations are
mine unless otherwise noted.
3. Cited in Vyacheslav Nedoshivin, Progulki po serebrianomu veku: doma i sud’by (St.
Petersburg: Litera, 2005), 112.
4. For an excellent treatment of the modernist fascination with the figures of the
commedia dell’arte, see J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’arte/
Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theater and Drama (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Uni-
versity Press, 1993).
5. Andrey Bely, “Tsvetnik Or” (review of The Puppet Show), Vesy 6 (1907): 67.
6. The Puppet Show emerged from a poem of the same name, written in July 1905. It
was another poet, Georgy Chulkov, who asked Blok to transform the poem into a
drama, which was then published in the symbolist almanac Torches (Fakely). Although
Blok was not enthusiastic about the adaptation at first, he quickly stumbled upon a
seemingly frenzied inspiration and finished the play in less than three weeks. The text
was published in April 1906, eight months before the play was staged.
7. When the renovations were completed, the theater’s interior also bespoke its in-
novative aesthetic. Osip Mandelshtam recalls the theater’s stark appearance: “To begin
with, she [Komissarzhevskaya] discarded all theatrical trumpery: the heat of candles, the
red flower beds of the orchestra seats, the satin nests of the loges. A wooden amphithea-
ter, white walls, gray hangings—clean as a yacht and bare as a Lutheran church” (Osip
Mandelstam, The Noise of Time, trans. Clarence Brown [ New York: Penguin, 1965], 111).
8. Avril Pyman, The Life of Alexander Blok, vol. 1, The Distant Thunder: 1880–1908 (New
York: Oxford, 1979), 259.
9. Natalya Volokhova, “Zemlia v snegu,” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo
universiteta. Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 4 (1961): 372. Subsequent references to
Volokhova’s memoirs will appear in the body of the text.
10. Valentina Verigina, “Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke,” Uchenye zapiski Tar-
tuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 4 (1961): 315. Subse-
quent references to Verigina’s memoirs will appear in the body of the text.
11. Mikhail Kuzmin, “V teatre,” in Stikhotvoreniia, ed. N. A. Bogomolov, Novaia
biblioteka poeta (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentstvo Akademicheskii proekt,
1996), xx.
12. Alexander Blok, “Oni chitaiut stikhi,” Snezhnaia maska, in Sobranie sochinenii v
vos’mi tomakh, vol. 2, ed. Vladmir Orlov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961),
244. Subsequent references to Blok’s poetry will appear in the body of the text. Also see
Volokhova, “Zemlia v snegu,” 374.
13. Mikhail Kuzmin, Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. and trans. Michael Green (Ann
Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), 157. Kuzmin also wrote a poem entitled “Kartonnyi domik”
(“The Cardboard House”) and included it in the cycle Prervannaia povest’ (An Interrupted
Tale). Mikhail Kuzmin, Sobranie stikhov I, ed. John Malmstad and Vladimir Markov
(Munich: W. Fink, 1977), 38.
T h e En c h a n t e d Ma s q u e r a de 193

14. Pyman, Life of Alexander Blok, 271.

15. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy,
vol. 2, From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 377. A lavish commemorative album of the event was published by the
empress in 1904.
16. Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malm-
stad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 29. Subsequent references to Bely’s
novel will appear in the body of the text.
17. Blok’s play was also not without its ties to the political context that surrounded
it; some viewers saw the figure of Columbine as the Russian Constitution that failed to
materialize in the Revolution of 1905 (Braun, Theater of Meyerhold, 73). On the theatrical
aspect of the political situation in 1905, see Christine Evans and Alexis Peri’s essay in this
volume, as well as Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
18. Murray Frame, School for Citizens: Theater and Civil Society in Imperial Russia (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 86.
19. E. Anthony Swift, Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002), 20.
20. Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 195.
21. Swift, Popular Theater, 25.
22. For a study of Ivanov’s Tower, see Ulla Hakanen’s article in this collection, as
well as her itinerary in Mapping Petersburg. On the significance of the restaurant Vienna
as a gathering place for writers, see McReynolds, Russia at Play, 206.
23. Yury Lotman, “Simvolika Peterburga i problemy semiotiki goroda,” in Izbran-
nye stat’i II (Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992), 16–18.
24. Cited in V. N. Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg: Iskus-
stvo, 2003), 35.
25. Colleen McQuillen, “The Dionysian Roots of Symbolist Masquerade Balls in
Petersburg and Poem without a Hero,” Ulbandus 8 (2004): 106–18.
26. Maurice Andrieux, Daily Life in Venice in the Time of Casanova, trans. Mary Fitton
(New York: Praeger, 1972), 120. Venetian carnival-goers also sometimes dressed as
figures from the commedia dell’arte, a detail that creates yet one more parallel between
the two masquerades. On the carnivalesque in The Puppet Show, see Timothy C. West-
phalen, “The Carnival-Grotesque and Blok’s The Puppet Show,” Slavic Review 52, no. 1
(Spring 1993): 49–66.
27. Toporov, Peterburgskii, 30, 46.
28. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed.
Michael W. Jennings, trans. H. Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006), 124. For further treatment of Blok’s flânerie, see Polina Barskova’s article
in this collection.
29. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 97–98.
 7
Panoramas from Above and
Street from Below
The Petersburg of Vyacheslav Ivanov and
Mikhail Kuzmin

         

The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of profound social change
for Petersburg. The site of Russian imperial power was being transformed into
a modern metropolis. The destruction of old social structures, accelerating in-
dustrialization, the development of a modern consumer culture, and the growth
of new residential areas built according to the latest architectural fashions all
shaped its urban space.
The practices through which people experienced the city changed too. In
classical studies of the city and of modernity, such as the works of Georg Simmel

194
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 195

and Walter Benjamin, vision holds a central place, both as a mode of percep-
tion (to see) and as part of the process of creating the self in relation to others (to
be seen).3 Walking is a practice related to both. The idle vagabond, or flâneur,
has been the symbol of the modern city, but other ways of walking and seeing
existed alongside him, ranging from Sunday strolls in parks with family mem-
bers to cruising in the sites of the nascent homosexual subculture.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau, who considers urban
space and its everyday practices as a system similar to language, describes the
relationship of city inhabitants to this language as tactical: they are confined to
the rules of its system but can apply them in a creative manner to serve their
own specific needs. One of the everyday practices that de Certeau presents as
functioning in this way is walking. Just like speech or writing, walking, too, has
its style and rhetoric—the turns and detours one makes affirm, suspect, test,
transgress, or respect the rules. This makes us not simply consumers of ready-
made spaces but their producers, too, and allows the city-dweller to make the
urban space his or her own. Walking, then, is a spatial acting-out of place; the
walker transforms the spatial signifiers into something else, actualizing in them
the potential for constructing identity.4
De Certeau juxtaposes everyday practices like walking to the panoramic
view, which “makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its
opaque mobility in a transparent text.” According to him, this panorama-city
is a theoretical simulacrum, belonging to “the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’
space of visual, panoptic or theoretical constructions.”5 In Bely’s Petersburg
such vision belongs to Apollon Apollonovich, who prefers to see Petersburg as
squares, parallelepipeds, and cubes and wants to control the crowd of shadows
from the islands threatening it. However, as I will show in this essay, panoramic
vision can also be affective, and reading the panorama-city can mobilize differ-
ent stylistic and rhetoric choices that in turn contribute to the creation of the self.
In this essay I focus on two Russian modernist writers, Vyacheslav Ivanov
and Mikhail Kuzmin, and consider how each appropriated the urban space of
Petersburg through his daily practices and individual vision of the city. Draw-
ing on their diaries, I explore their typical modes of perception and urban
movement and map their personal “topographies,” or descriptions of place—
which takes us to the neighborhood of the Tauride Gardens, in whose vicinity
both Ivanov and Kuzmin lived from 1905. Despite their spiritual affinity, the
ways the two writers experienced the city differed in accordance with their
respective worldviews, including their aesthetic ideas.
Two distinct visions of the city emerge from the private writings of Iva-
nov and Kuzmin: panoramas and close-ups, reflecting their differing social
196    

orientations. The famous apartment of Ivanov, the Tower, functions for him as
a base, from which he orients himself toward unity and the sublime. Kuzmin,
on the other hand, does not have a home of his own; he lives and spends time as
a visitor in the homes of relatives and friends, and much of his movement in the
city is motivated by his homosexual orientation. He has an eye for the details of
city life, which he records in his diary, including the city’s profane elements.
Petersburg has certainly produced a rich tradition of writers who self-
identify with the city space and associate their creative lives with the city.6 What
I will focus on here are the daily practices of living in this city and the ways in
which Ivanov and Kuzmin framed themselves by the city in their diaries—the
kinds of “settings” these author-protagonists created for themselves.7 Although
Petersburg is an important locus in both of their biographies, neither writer,
strictly speaking, numbers among the canonical authors of what is called the
Petersburg text of Russian literature.
Mikhail Kuzmin kept a diary almost continuously from 1905 until 1934,
conscientiously adhering, especially in the beginning, to the imperative to write
every day. It was Kuzmin’s example that inspired Ivanov to begin writing daily
once again, but as previously in his life, he succeeded in doing so only sporadi-
cally. For Kuzmin the diary was an important tool of self-creation, including
the creation of his public image. He read excerpts from it aloud to friends or al-
lowed them to read it themselves, so that soon his diary acquired notoriety in
symbolist circles. One of the greatest admirers of Kuzmin’s diary was Ivanov
himself, praising it in his own diary as a work of art and lecture édifiante:

But first and foremost, the diary is an artistic reflection of life, of life that flows
somewhere according to its concealed tides, whimsical and extraordinary, in
the contrast it creates between the pleasure of the object of perception and of
the experiencing subject—the diary is a reflection, which sometimes creates
astonishingly clear reliefs. And besides, the author of the diary knows the secret
of a pleasing style, which by now has almost been lost. (Ivanov, 2:750)

Kuzmin, too, noted the significance of the event: “It was extremely important
for me, and for some reason I think it was for the Ivanovs, too. Whatever hap-
pens next, the ice has been broken.”8 In other words, his diary played an im-
portant role in bringing the two poets closer to each other.

Ne ig hbor s a t Tavric he s kaya

In the summer of 1905, Vyacheslav Ivanov and his wife, Lidiya Zinovieva-
Annibal, also a writer, settled in St. Petersburg after living in Europe for many
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 197

years. “We realized that now it is time to be here,” explained Zinovieva-

Annibal to a memoirist.9 The couple rented an apartment on the mansard
floor of a recently completed apartment house on 25 Tavricheskaya (Tauride)
Street, the discovery of which they subsequently mythologized: seeing a “for
rent” sign on one of the buildings in the neighborhood of the Tauride Palace,
Zinovieva-Annibal ascended to the top floor and recognized the round room
from a dream she had had while they still lived in Geneva.10 On August 29,
1905, Ivanov wrote to Valery Bryusov in Moscow:

We live (the two of us, me and Lidiya Dmitrievna) at the top of a round tower
above the Tauride Gardens and its swan lake. Behind the park, behind the
Neva, lie the fantastic contours of the whole of St. Petersburg, all the way till the
distant forests on the horizon. At twilight, the time I am writing to you, the can-
nons are shooting a warning about the rise of the waters of the Neva, and the
wind from the sea is whirling the yellow leaves in the park and groaning and
knocking on my tower.11

Soon the apartment became known as the Tower (Bashnia), the site of the fa-
mous Wednesday gatherings, which practically all the members of the early
twentieth-century cultural elite visited, regardless of their political and artistic
affiliations. The most contemporary and pressing questions of art and philoso-
phy were debated here, and sometimes the artists and philosophers climbed to
the roof of the building to recite poetry, many of which would become future
literary classics. In the early 1910s Andrey Bely stayed there while working on
Petersburg, reading it to Ivanov as the work progressed. Ivanov was enraptured
by it, and it was he who convinced Bely that “Petersburg is the only possible title,
which would honor this text, the protagonist of which is no less than the Bronze
Horseman.”12
On the very same day that Ivanov wrote to Bryusov, only a few blocks away
in another new apartment building, Mikhail Kuzmin was writing a letter to an
old friend, Georgy Chicherin. Kuzmin had just returned to Petersburg from
his travels in the Russian provinces and settled in his sister’s apartment:

You know my address: the corner of Suvorovskaya (Suvorov) and Tavri-

cheskaya Streets, house 34, apartment 10; it is terribly light here, high up, a
view of the sky over rooftops, of the Okhta, close by are the Tauride Gardens,
the building is new and huge, stained-glass windows on the staircase, electricity,
telephone, bathrooms, panel doors. The room is on the street side. All in all, 7
rooms in the apartment. (Kuzmin, 496n36)

What is striking about these two passages are the different “keys” in which
they portray the experience of urban space. Ivanov looks at the city from a
198    

distance; seen from his tower, the city appears as a panorama in which
concrete details are blended into the “fantastic contours” of the landscape, with
the window functioning as a frame for a Romantic landscape painting. The
cannons’ warnings of flooding are real, but at the same time they evoke a key
element of Petersburg mythology, as if Ivanov had moved right into the space
of the Petersburg text.13 As I will show, the city itself is not of great importance
for Ivanov. Echoing his symbolist ideology, he distances himself from the
streets—from the everyday and the masses—and represents the city as mystical
space and artifact, like the panorama that opens from his window.
Kuzmin is also an admirer of Petersburg panoramas, but at the same time
he is very sensitive to the phenomena of the modern city and its diverse life. He
is concerned with the warmth and comfort of home; the letter to Chicherin lists
features of modern domestic space: light, stained-glass windows (possibly in the
new style moderne), modern conveniences like electricity, telephone, and bath-
rooms. Yet because of frequent financial problems, as well as his search for a
partner, Kuzmin’s life was very mobile, resulting in close-ups of portions and
facets of the city, as we see in his diaries. He exploits the many faces of the
metropolis in his search for identity, so that through him we are able to map
the emergence of new urban subcultures. In the everyday practices of walking,
dressing, and eating he makes the city his own.
For Kuzmin the daily navigation of the city, including visits to the Tau-
ride Gardens, is an integral part of self-creation, with the urban landscape
playing an important role, while for Ivanov, walking has the function of an
introspective stroll, and his depictions lack a sense of the times or of the con-
temporary city.

St rolling St . Pe t er sbu r g

In Russian cultural history, the practice of strolling is closely associated with

Petersburg. The critic Vissarion Belinsky noted in his essay “Petersburg and
Moscow,” originally published in Physiology of Petersburg (1845), that of the two
Russian capitals, Petersburg was the space for walking and public life.14 Ac-
cording to him, Moscow—where Ivanov was born—is more home-oriented,
“the city of patriarchal family life,” whose narrow streets are empty by ten in
the evening.15 In Petersburg, the site of well-developed institutions that support
a lifestyle both public and anonymous, the streets are still crowded at midnight:
“Petersburg loves the street, strolling, theater, café, music pavilions, in short, all
public institutions.”16 Whereas in Moscow people take a horse-drawn cab, in
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 199

Petersburg they walk, which is healthy, but most importantly, “it is comfortable
to walk in Petersburg: there are no hills or slopes, everything is flat and even,
sidewalks are paved with flagstone, some even with granite—wide, even, and
any time of year clean as a floor.”17
Alongside gulian’e, an older tradition of popular outdoor fêtes, progulka, the
stroll, gained greater popularity in the early nineteenth century, as the upper
classes followed the example of Alexander I, who took daily public walks.
Around noon Nevsky Prospect was taken over by idle wanderers, whereas
those who spent the day working appeared in the evening.18 The visibility of
popular forms of walking increased toward the end of the century, as more and
more leisure activities expanded into public spaces; and parks, which previ-
ously had been restricted to the aristocracy, were now transformed into com-
mercial facilities that attracted the growing middle classes.19
From the 1830s, strolling gained popularity as a means of producing knowl-
edge about the city and its population.20 Beside structuring and being pre-
scribed by guidebooks, the “leisurely discursive practice” of the stroll was also a
widely used strategy in fictional texts, in which, instead of defining the tempo-
ral sequence of narrative through a fixed point of view, the flow of the text
came to be informed by the observer’s movement.21 Such activity of reading
the texture of the city and transforming it into text became the narrative prin-
ciple at the basis of modern flânerie. The flâneur sees the modern city in scenes
and images, perceiving them as readable texts, or “documents.” The task a
Baudelairean flâneur presents himself is the transformation of this texture of
images into an artistic text; he is an “author who turns his everyday perceptions
into literary description.”22

The Ta uride Ga rd en s

In Mapping St. Petersburg, Julie Buckler interrogates the traditional textual and
imaginary “maps” of the capital of Russia. She notes that the seeming uniformity
of the image of Petersburg in Russian literature—the strong dualism of palaces
and slums—has been produced by neglecting its eclectic physical character:
the sociocultural “middle” between the rich and poor and the literary forms
related to it.23 She argues that such a polarized image of the city is a kind of
“panorama” in which the local, eclectic, and transitional have been lost.24
Between the sites rich in literary connotations lie “gray areas,” which have not
been illuminated unless we turn to documentary genres or widen the body of
fictional works that we place under scrutiny.25
200    

One such area that has received surprisingly little attention in literature
on Petersburg—not even by Buckler—is the Tauride Gardens, located, so to
speak, under Ivanov’s and Kuzmin’s windows. In the Petersburg text it has
remained on the sidelines, eclipsed by the Summer Gardens, which are more
central, both geographically and in literary terms. The Tauride Gardens, the
kind of sociocultural “middle” that Buckler discusses, serve as a boundary zone
between different social groups: on one side of the park is the wealthier Liteiny
district; on the other, spreads Peski, a neighborhood for the poor. For a con-
temporary cultural geographer, the Tauride Gardens of the turn of the twenti-
eth century are of interest precisely because they form the kind of heterogene-
ous urban space where cultural battles between members of different social
groups took place.
The history of the gardens begins as part of the imperial history of St. Pe-
tersburg. An English park with ponds, canals, bridges, gazebos, artificial hills,
and grottos, it was created in the 1780s by Catherine the Great’s favorite,
Prince Grigory Potyomkin, to surround his palace, and for decades it was re-
served for the use of members of the court only. It was opened to the public—
to “the respectable public, for strolling”26—in the 1860s, a decade character-
ized in Russia by the restructuring of social hierarchies. Gradually the social
connotations of the park changed. The 1874 guidebook Peterburg ves’ na ladoni
(All of Petersburg on Your Palm) noted that although the greatest days of the park
were over, it still remained one of the best in Petersburg in size and upkeep.
The guidebook lamented, however, that because of the park’s remoteness
from the center, it did not attract many visitors—mostly just residents from the
nearby modest quarters of Peski.27 Others worried that the once miraculous
park was being transformed into “an ordinary city garden with kiosks and
dusty alleys” and that its new uses compromised its aesthetically pleasing
appearance.28 In 1887 the journalist V. O. Mikhnevich complained that the
“once favorite refuge for the environs’ elegiac poets and the Office of Public
Order’s hopelessly enamored bureaucrats has recently acquired ill fame and
in the eyes of the moral authorities brought disrepute to all of Peski.” He
claimed that the restaurant that had opened some years earlier corrupted the
place:
The gardens attract all the wild, bacchanalian, and slothful elements of the
local population. There reigns the so-called striutsky [base, worthless, contempt-
ible person]—a peculiar creature of urban zoology, partly a man of culture,
who had become acquainted with the taste of cognac and finest Madeira and
learned how to use a handkerchief (if he has one in his pocket), and partly a
total Papuan, who at the moment of drinking becomes rude, barbarous, and
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 201

shameless. [. . .] This rabble nests in legions on the outskirts of Petersburg, in-

cluding Peski, supporting the sales in local drinking establishments, and taking
a breath of fresh air in the Tauride Gardens. Representatives of the fairer sex,
similar in character, accompany them, sip and exchange caresses with the
“striutskys” of the Tauride Gardens. Only on Sundays there swarm different,
naive, merchant families of Peski in their common old Sunday best, cut in the
fifties’ style and smelling like camphor, and with the imperturbability of pagan
idols, they clap their fatigued eyes on the drunken stupidity and disgracefulness
around them. . . . For them it is entertaining!”29

But as we will see, such unconventional conduct and mixture of social classes
made for a captivating experience for some members of the artistic bohemia.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the park was a popular locale for
strolls for all social classes. It was divided into three parts: the immediate vicin-
ity of the palace, which was closed to the public; alongside Potyomkin Street,
an area providing entertainment for an entrance fee; and the rest of the park,
which was open to everyone. In 1898 a stage was built in the park and in the
summer the Guardianship of Public Sobriety arranged different programs
there, ranging from jugglers and acrobats to musical concerts, including mili-
tary bands. In winter the hills became sledding slopes, and ponds became skat-
ing rinks; skating was especially popular at the turn of the century, and one
memoirist writes that the Empress Maria Fyodorovna and other members of
the imperial family used to skate on the frozen ponds of the Tauride.30 The

View of the Tauride Palace and the Tauride Gardens behind it (Niva, 1907); on the left one can see
the recently built 25 Tauride Street, rising over the neighborhood. (courtesy of the Slavonic Library,
National Library of Finland)
202    

Tauride Palace was a meeting place of the high arts as well as the new consumer
culture, housing both art and trade exhibitions. In 1906 the palace became the
site of the first representative political body of Russia, the State Duma, which
assembled there until the February revolution of 1917—so the Tauride saw its
share of revolutionary activities. In May 1906 strollers were surprised by the
leaflets urging them to join the struggle against the tsarist regime; in December
the park was the scene of the attempted assassination of the former Moscow
governor.31 Images, even caricatures, of the Tauride Gardens and Tauride
Palace often appeared in newspapers of this time.

Ivan ov : Solit ude in “ Fa nt a st ic Pet r o b a g d a d ”

In Ivanov’s diary, Petersburg appears as both a land- and soundscape that

enter the apartment just as he described in the letter to Bryusov. Depictions of
the surroundings typically appear at the beginning of his diary entries as intro-
ductions to other concerns: the whereabouts of the members of his household,
abstract ideological questions, or his current writings.
Summer days in the city. How nice it is in the Tower. Everything is well orga-
nized, it is a cool and silent oasis up high, above the Tauride Gardens with their
green pond and silver stretches. Proofreading in Latin, philological elucubra-
tions, mythology. My semicircular window to the left of grandfather’s ancient
bureau open to the evening, I sit behind it, my back to Lidiya’s smaller ma-
hogany bureau, with roses in front of her portrait—my window turns into a
magical aperture into the world of green, blue, and violet blotches, rippling
behind the luminous river and the phantasmal seas, the distant clouds and the
crimson chimeras of the sunset. The musical whistles of steamships and squeals
of sirens. [. . .] In my soul, I feel orphaned. (Ivanov, 2:773)32

For Ivanov the Tower is a refuge, whose height both protects him and allows
him to admire the city from a distance. The city turns into an art object—a
painting framed by the window, magically coming to life both in the movement
of its pointillist surface and in the changing colors of the seasons.
The location of Ivanov’s apartment on the top floor coincided well with the
symbolists’ distrust of the mundane and their aspiration toward the heavenly
and divine. The round towerlike structure at the corner of the building also
nurtured the idea of retreat to an “ivory tower.”33 These connotations are con-
firmed by Ivanov in his diary: he reiterates the idea of vertical distance by lo-
cating himself high up and referring to the surrounding areas as “down there”
(Ivanov, 2:746). In the private realm of the diary, he represents himself as
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 203

separated from the daily life of the city and its people, on occasion descending
to them as part of his mission as symbolist poet.34 Through vertical distance
from ground level, Ivanov articulates the sense of his separateness from the
people—the idea of the tragic but necessary split between the poet and crowd,
which he formulated in his essay “The Poet and the Mob” (“Poet i chern’,”
1904).35 Although he feels connected with people ideologically, on the practical
level he is unable to connect with them. Instead of merging into the crowd, he
looks for his other half among the people, echoing Platonic ideas: “I walk and
see nothing. People are staring at me. Am I cheerful or desperate? Everything
is somehow strangely revealed in people. All people are my doubles, but where
is the one, where is he?” (Ivanov, 2:754).
Ivanov was not a modern urban dweller and remained rather indifferent to
the bustling city around him. As one memoirist notes, he “was a stay-at-home
who only seldom visited his friends.”36 Usually people visited him: his diary is
filled with lists of the comings and goings of visitors (people asking for an “audi-
ence,” as the inhabitants of the Tower started to call them). In their memoirs
contemporaries describe how Ivanov surrounded himself with Roman and
Dionysian paintings, statues, and wallpaper, creating a home space that was in-
dependent of time and geography.37 In this regard he bears some resemblance
to the modern “collector,” who according to Benjamin is a “true resident of the
interior” and “delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone
but also better—a world in which, to be sure, human beings are no better pro-
vided with what they need than in the real world, but in which things are freed
from the drudgery of being useful.”38 The window giving onto the city was yet
another painting in his collection. The Tower was the center of Ivanov’s world,
a place demarcated as his own and a base from which he could compose and
manage his relations with the outside.39
Yet the panorama opening from Ivanov’s windows was in fact a product of
modernity. As de Certeau notes, “the desire to see the city [from above] pre-
ceded the means of satisfying it.”40 This is especially true in flat Petersburg,
where there are no natural formations one might ascend to gain a view of
the city from above. A view from the sixth floor still had an aura of novelty
from the perspective of the turn-of-the-century city dweller.41 The building at
Tavricheskaya Street was one of the first multistory apartment buildings in
the neighborhood, which in 1905 still consisted mainly of wooden houses
surrounded by outbuildings and kitchen gardens.42 It is no surprise, then, that
Ivanov and his visitors were overwhelmed by the experience of viewing the city
from above, when occasionally after the Wednesday gatherings they ascended
to the roof of the Tower to recite poetry.
204    

The classic panorama associated with Petersburg is the one seen from the
embankments of the Neva rather than from the bird’s-eye view. As Vladimir
Mikhnevich writes in the 1874 guidebook Peterburg ves’ na ladoni: “The best view
of St. Petersburg opens from the embankments of the Neva. [. . .] But one
should bear in mind that this remarkable view does not strike us as an example
of natural beauty, but as the creation of man’s hands. [. . .] The wide splendid
Neva plays here the kind of role a mirror has for all the miracles of work and
art.”43 Ivanov, too, would walk with Zinovieva-Annibal along the embank-
ments, where he enjoyed the panoramic views, as well as taking “strolls on a
yacht,” that is, short cruises on the Neva.
In Ivanov’s case we can think of his peripatetics truly as the practice of
walking while engaging in philosophical discourse. Just as the landscapes from
his window serve as a way of entering other thoughts he records in his diary, so
the walks along the embankments and in the Tauride and Summer Gardens
function as a setting for more important things: plans for the future, or later,
for occult experiences. In 1909 the deceased Lidiya appeared to him in the
Tauride Gardens, where they used to stroll together, as well as in the cemetery
where her grave is located. After these “physical” encounters, she also “wrote”
in Ivanov’s diary. Both the physical space and the space of the diary become
part of the realm of the mystical for him. Free of time and geography, Ivanov’s
apartment was also a space for indulging his interest in the exotic, including
Oriental, culture, which influenced his experience of the city at large. The cul-
mination of his fascination for the Orient, which Ivanov shared with many of
his contemporaries, was the creation of the so-called Hafiz Society, at whose
meetings heady drinks stimulated discussions and expressions of love. “Peters-
burg we called Petrobagdad then; it was fantastic—an era of Eros,” Ivanov
later wrote (Ivanov, 2:754).44

Ku zm i n: A Pa int e r of Mode r n S t r eet L i fe

Kuzmin, too, was an admirer of Petersburg panoramas, but his world was
much less stable, and the panoramas, too, could prove to be perishable: “The
Neva seen from my window, when looked at through binoculars, turns out
to be a gray steel roof which, naturally, deprived the landscape of some of its
poetry, but the forests and beach are there for sure” (Kuzmin, 36–37). In the
diary, scenery and changes in weather have the rhetorical function of record-
ing Kuzmin’s moods. The panoramas are not always sublime; often they create
a sense of loss and decay, which remind him of places, people, and books from
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 205

his past, evoking a “dreamy grief, a feeling not completely without pleasure”
(35). The guiding principle of his vision and the main rhetorical device of his
comments is parallelism, a kind of “logic of sameness”—urban scenes remind
him of people and places he has seen and especially of books he has read. The
panorama generates a feeling of “here” as waiting and longing, whereas
“there” would afford gratification.
Besides admiring the landscape, Kuzmin had the habit of looking into win-
dows (smotret’ v okna), both from home and when on the move in the city. In fact,
Kuzmin is a peeper who stands at his window observing his neighbors, for which
he can use the binoculars he keeps available on his window sill. His gaze scans
the panorama in search of the detail on which it can focus: “Got up late. [. . .]
Arranged some things at home, slept, had tea, looked into windows outside and
in the courtyard, where in the opposite apartment Alexey was fixing some-
thing; he is beautiful, that Alexey” (153). This practice of scanning a scene and
focusing on some detail is also typical of Kuzmin’s poetry, so it is no surprise
that he later became a great admirer of cinema. It also shows not only how win-
dows open onto static panoramic landscapes but also how such views can be
transformed into more detailed close-ups.
Writing on Kuzmin’s Petersburg, Vladimir Toporov notes how the rela-
tionship between city and home, landscape and interior, becomes “osmotic” in
his prose. The street penetrates the house and vice versa: windows, rooms, and
people are looked at from the outside.45 This is also the case with Kuzmin’s
diary: sights and sounds penetrate through the windows and doors and even
through walls. If Ivanov’s window was a painting, for Kuzmin the window is a
permeable surface, and he himself plays an active role in the reception of the
images. The boundaries between private and public are fluid, which also fre-
quently creates erotic anticipation.
Kuzmin’s principal mode of perception, however, is street-level observa-
tion. Especially in the first years (between 1905 and 1907), the Kuzmin of his
diary resembles the figure of the flâneur. With his eye for detail and his emo-
tional sensibility—the basis of his creative writing—the modern city with its
constant flow of stimuli offers him a perfect setting. His experience of the city is
intense; he is both urban observer and participant, which the practice of daily
writing nourishes.46
Although Kuzmin originally planned to “live in an ivory tower, as disci-
plined as possible, in graceful solitude,” his days were filled with visits, walks,
strolls, and journeys to different parts of the city (Kuzmin, 31). Often the strolls
recorded in his diary take us to less-described Petersburg locations, such as the
Tauride Gardens and the Mariinsky Market, and introduce socially marginal
206    

figures, such as shop attendants, hooligans, and homosexuals. Kuzmin was a

“painter of modern life” whose practice of daily writing enabled him to provide
detailed observations and turned the diary into a kind of ethnography.47 The
movement in the city by foot, horse-drawn tram, or horse cab facilitated, pos-
sibly even led Kuzmin to, certain types of observations and sets of questions. As
he wrote retrospectively in 1934, being on the move was both an existential
condition for him and an epistemological principle: “New places. Despite all
my inclination to stay at home, and my conservatism, I adore new places, but
not so much new places as new perspectives, point de vue. To ride on a horse or
now drive a car, when one can make a stop every minute, appears to me as one
of the main pleasures of existence. Even better is to go on foot.”48
Kuzmin’s relationship to people was characterized by the pursuit of close-
ness. To articulate it, he used the same architectural characteristics of buildings
that in Ivanov’s case manifested distance: “The Kuzmins have a nice apart-
ment, the windows are low (how nice it is when windows are on the first floor,
or the ground floor if it is a bel étage, not separated from the people—there one
can never face such melancholy as from sixth-floor windows, made abstract by
height, abandoned through elevation, with a view of the distance)” (Kuzmin,
219).49 In Kuzmin’s diary, people are the city. This sets him apart from Peters-
burg preservationists like Alexander Benois, whose works he otherwise ad-
mired.50 Kuzmin appreciated domestic space, its warmth and amenities (he
regularly notes the warmth of the homes and shops he visits, as well as their
coziness, uiut ), but for company he often needed to go out into the city. When
observing the crowd, he notes familiar or pleasant faces; he transforms both the
instability and anonymity of urban life to his benefit; he enjoys surprises and
unexpected events, describing, for instance, how he mistook a stranger on the
street for a friend but did not become disconcerted by the mistake and con-
tinued to follow the stranger—just for fun. He enjoyed it when things turned out
to be other than he had first thought, when familiar categories did not apply.
The positive value of the unexpected is related to Kuzmin’s understanding
of love: serendipity is eroticized because a relationship with someone he already
knows cannot turn into love: “To fall in love is possible only at first sight, not
gradually, and it is possible to combine acquaintance and love only if one has
gotten acquainted when almost already enamored” (Kuzmin, 150). In anony-
mous encounters, he could attain moments of casual intimacy: the proximity of
the barber’s body when he got a haircut or the beauty of a floor-polisher. Kuz-
min preferred shops and other businesses where he had seen beautiful attend-
ants and would get excited about a visit to a new bathhouse, where he would be
served by a banshchik (bathouse attendant) previously unknown to him. As Sara
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 207

Ahmed has pointed out, sexual orientation, like many other metaphors used to
express sexual love (inclination, deviant, pervert, invert, tendency, drive, queer,
etc.) is a spatial term. It points to the way one is placed in relation to objects
and toward which objects one is directed: “sexual desire orientates the subject
toward some others (and by implication not other others) by establishing a line
or direction.”51 This is much the case for Kuzmin—homosexual desire oriented
his movements in the city, as well as guided his perceptions.
The city was an erotic space for him: he experienced even the violence on
the streets during the Revolution of 1905 ambivalently, as both terrifying and
tempting. In general, Kuzmin was not a chronicler of great political events, re-
maining indifferent to the Revolution of 1905 for a long time, that is, until the
atmosphere of the streets captivated him: “Strikes and pogroms create some
kind of cheerfully catastrophic atmosphere in the city and for the life in the
streets, there’s something hysterical in the air” (Kuzmin, 65). He felt irritated
by the intelligentsia who “look out from windows with binoculars at their own
doormen thinking they are the hooligans”; in his diary he criticized the aristoc-
racy for its false identification with the people (59, 63–64).52 He found beauty
in, and was aroused by, the potency that the unrest evoked. Both the strength
of the masses and that of the authorities on the streets controlling them re-
ceived admiring comments in Kuzmin’s diary.
One special group that fascinated Kuzmin were the hooligans, a new social
category debated actively in the press at the time.53 At the beginning of the cen-
tury, the boulevard press reported an increasing number of public disturbances
on the streets of big cities. Kuzmin was often witness to such rowdy behavior
and recorded these events in his diary. He first treated hooligans as political
protestors, but soon they became transformed into objects of desire; he even
asked his shop-assistant friends to introduce him to some. John Malmstad and
Nikolay Bogomolov connect this with “his own sense of alienation from the
dominant culture,” which he had not yet completely overcome, but there was
clearly something erotic in his interest in these young men too.54 After one bois-
terous evening in the Tauride Gardens, Kuzmin himself became the target of
hooligan violence. He had invited some street musicians to join him in a cab
ride on Nevsky, when a group of eight attacked them: “There was nowhere to
run. I’ve never experienced such a bitter and fervent feeling as when my nose
and temple were smashed and bleeding” (Kuzmin, 165).
Beside his desire to see and meet people, Kuzmin was also concerned about
how he himself was perceived—as Malmstad and Bogomolov note, he was “al-
ways keenly aware of costume as a means of proclaiming difference and indif-
ference to reigning tastes and moral proscriptions.”55 In 1905 Kuzmin was still
208    

in his “Russian phase,” whose external signs were a beard and poddyovka, a Rus-
sian long coat. At that time, his favorite places in Petersburg were its narrow
streets of merchant shops and markets, like Mariinsky, which was part of the
Apraksin Yard market. At the turn of the century, Mariinsky’s hotel restaurant
was known for its Russian dishes, music, and waitresses in national costumes:
it was a popular locale among provincial merchants visiting the city on busi-
ness.56 As well as the trappings of his outward appearance, Kuzmin used the
surrounding city to help create his self-identity. In Petersburg, the symbol of
the West in Russia, he chose to spend time in its “rustic” parts, like the quarters
of the Mariinsky Market and the small merchant shops around Zagorodny
Prospect. Here he spent time in icon shops and taverns with friends, many of
whom were shop assistants and peasant migrants.57

“ Where Do I Find a St yl e
t o De sc ribe This St roll . . .”

At the beginning of 1906, Kuzmin’s life started to change. He entered the

artistic circles of Petersburg and started to frequent the Ivanovs’ Tower. His
outward appearance also changed; from a seminarian he transformed into a
dandy.58 Instead of to the provincial parts of the city, his movements were now
directed toward the apartments of his new friends. The relatively small (origi-
nally only three-room) apartment on the mansard floor where the Ivanovs
lived was in fact typical housing for the lower middle class and bohemia. But
most of Kuzmin’s new friends lived in bourgeois apartments.59 Instead of small
taverns, Kuzmin started to visit restaurants like Vienna, which had became
famous as a meeting place for members of the cultural elite.60 In the Summer
Garden and especially the Tauride, Kuzmin was drawn to the homosexual
company he found there.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a homosexual subculture began to
emerge in big cities across Europe, with known cruising areas in city parks and
streets, bathhouses, and favored restaurants. As Dan Healey notes, in Peters-
burg, too, the group “developed its own geographies of sexualized streetscapes,
its rituals of contact and socialization, its signals and gestures, and its own fra-
ternal language.”61 One of the most important cruising strips was the Tauride
Gardens, which Kuzmin and some other members of the cultural intelligentsia
visited, often on their way to the Ivanovs.62 They amused themselves with plans
to publish a map of the homosexual subculture, or “pays du tendre,” as they called
it, accompanied by a poem “voyage du pays du tendre au pays chaud ” (“journey from
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 209

the land of tenderness to the land of heat,” i.e., from the park to the bathhouse)
(Kuzmin, 173). It was never realized, but in Kuzmin’s diary we find some frag-
ments of this alternative map of the park and the city. The cruising in Tauride
followed a certain route, which could be repeated several times during one eve-
ning; different parts of the park, as well as members of the subculture, had nick-
names.63 Kuzmin calls visits to the Tauride escapades, escapes from the norms
and language of the majority; other homosexuals he refers to as gramotnye (liter-
ate ones).64 When, after one of the Wednesday gatherings, the participants as-
cended to the roof of the Tower, Kuzmin commented on the view: “marvelous,
like Babylon” (Kuzmin, 137). Besides referring to the beauty and greatness of
the city, the remark evokes the legend of the Tower of Babel and casts Kuzmin’s
strolls in the Tauride Gardens as an experience of multiple languages and com-
munities. He scanned the crowd in the park with the purpose of finding out
who were members of the same group and speakers of the same “language.”
Kuzmin by then was comfortable with his sexual identity, but cruising in the
Tauride Gardens was a delicate balancing act between being recognized by
one’s own kind yet not revealing the difference too openly:

We stopped by at the Tauride; lots of people, but very few literate ones
[. . . Pavlik] tried to prove in every possible way that to walk hand in hand in
the Tauride is inappropriate, that people will point at us, that he does not want
to make a show, that elsewhere he can walk even embracing another, but hand
in hand in the Tauride—that’s not done. (185)

The passage reveals the different perceptions of same-sex desire by the men
themselves: Kuzmin, an active participant of the subculture, differed from Pav-
lik, who did not want to be identified by his sexual orientation.
Homosexual cruising blurred the boundaries between private and public as
previously hidden spheres of life became visible. The spread of the private into
the public, as well as the existence of a group with its own “language,” was seen
by the authorities and members of mainstream society as a threat to the preva-
lent order and caused indignation.65 Another—published—attempt to “map”
homosexual Petersburg was V. P. Ruadze’s 1908 exposé K sudu . . !
Gomoseksual’nyi Peterburg (To the Court . . ! Homosexual Petersburg), which imitates the
genre of the guidebook and takes the reader to the city’s cruising sites and hide-
outs. Ruadze was a criminal reporter and an author of several books on notori-
ous court cases at the beginning of the century, and most of K sudu. .! is devoted
to exposing the “vices” practiced in private apartments. Yet the book also
proves that homosexual subculture was a visible part of turn-of-the-century
Petersburg.66 For many the park offered the possibility of legitimate admiration
210    

of young male bodies. The skating rink, tennis court, and other sports facilities
were precisely such locales; skating rinks especially had the reputation of places
for homosexual encounters at the turn of the century.67
Ivanov’s homosexual experiment with the young poet Sergey Gorodetsky
never affected his experience of the city and of the Tauride Gardens; it re-
mained confined within the Ivanov apartment and the metaphysical life there—
as part of his utopian thinking influenced by classical philosophy.68 Kuzmin
was ready to transgress class boundaries in search for companionship, and
many of his friends were clearly attracted by the “corrupt” aspect of his lifestyle
and diary: pimps, hustlers, hooligans, taverns, fights, and other nonconformist
street behavior. For many of the readers of Kuzmin’s diary, it opened a window
onto the underworld they dared not visit in person.69

The way Ivanov and Kuzmin each experienced the city is directly related to
their life practices and their aesthetic and ideological principles. Ivanov’s base
in the Tower coincides with his orientation toward the divine and the transcen-
dental. In his poetry Petersburg appears as a mythical and intertextual space,
in the tradition of the canonic Petersburg text: as phantasmal Palmyra, the city
of misery and mist, where the Bronze Horseman stumbles on dead bodies.70 In his
life practices, Ivanov was more oriented toward home and concerned with the
creation of a utopian family: he and Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal attempted to
create a triangular relationship, first with the poet Sergey Gorodetsky and,
after that had failed, with Margarita Sabashnikova, a painter and the wife of
poet Maximilian Voloshin. For them the expansion of a double union into tri-
angular love represented a step toward communalism. After Lidiya’s death
Ivanov formed a relationship with Vera Shvarsalon, her daughter from a pre-
vious marriage, in whom he believed Lidiya’s spirit lived.71 It was the scandal of
Vera’s pregnancy that made the family leave Petersburg in 1912. They returned
to Russia after a year in Europe but settled this time in Moscow—again in a
top-floor apartment with a view over the city. After the October Revolution
they had to move to another apartment because their building was no longer
heated. The new apartment was in a basement, suggesting that the loss of status
was accompanied by the loss of the panoramic, or (one could say) panoptic,
view. In the cycle titled “Songs of the Times of Troubles” (“Pesni smutnogo vre-
meni,” 1918), Ivanov writes: “In the basement, with a candle / I sit on guard /
of a quietening house” (Ivanov, 4:72). Although similar expressions of loneliness
appear in his Petersburg writings, the image that this citation evokes stands in
striking contrast to the depictions of the Tower, such as in Bely’s witty memoirs,
according to which “Ivanov was hanging over the Duma, like a singing spider,
collecting black flies, striking a blow on decadent salons.”72
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 211

For Kuzmin, walking was not only a routine but had great symbolic value:
his routes, manners, and company were all part of identity building. Typically
his poetry, in contrast to Ivanov’s, focused on concrete details. Kuzmin pro-
vides an interesting representation of perspective in his story “High Window”
(“Vysokoe okno,” 1912–13). Although no place-names are given, the discussion
of panoramic and street-level views is clearly based on the view of the Tauride
Gardens from the Tower, where Kuzmin had been living.73 The protagonist of
the story is a small boy who overhears adults say that his father’s lofty ideas are
the product of the beautiful view opening from the windows of the sixth-floor
apartment. The boy becomes enchanted by the view from his window of the
horse-guard parade (whose barracks were next to the Tauride Gardens). When
seen from a distance, the soldiers and horses have no limbs, instead they form a
seductive golden snake, slithering to the rhythm of the music. The next time
the boy sees a horse guard is from a window of a basement shop; all he sees are
dirty boots, which evoke in him fear of violence and cruelty. He is left confused
about which of these perspectives offers the correct picture, until he actually
meets a guardsman whose answer to his questions can be read as a formulation
of an aesthetic principle: “That’s what happens if you make your impressions
about things from the attic or from the basement. You should approach the
thing directly and close up—then you will recognize it.”74 For Kuzmin, the
ideal is the real encounter: proximity and experience through sensation, for
which one must go out into the street, leaving behind the mediating framed
view of the window, which punctuates the experience instead of leaving it
open-ended—and available to further plot development.


I want to thank Olga Matich and all the “mappers” for the truly stimulating experience
of working with them while I was at Berkeley and for their generous comments on my
work. Early drafts of this essay were presented in a research seminar at the University of
Helsinki, and I am grateful for the comments I received there. I want to thank also Kirsti
Ekonen, Maija Könönen, and Gennady Obatnin for their help throughout the project.
1. Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, vol. 2, ed. D. V. Ivanov and
O. Deschartes (Brussels: Foyer Oriental Chrétien, 1971–87), 259. Subsequent page ref-
erences to this edition are given parenthetically in the text, cited by volume and page.
2. Mikhail Kuzmin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia litera-
tura, 1990), 22.
3. On modernity’s emphasis on the visual, see Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a
Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 97–101.
5. Ibid., 92–93. See also the introduction to this volume.
212    

6. See Anna Lisa Crone and Jessica Day, My Petersburg/Myself: Mental Architecture and
Imaginative Space in Modern Russian Letters (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2004).
7. In prerevolutionary Russia diary-writing flourished, and especially for symbol-
ists, the diary was an important tool for self-creation. On diaries of cultural figures of this
period, see N. A. Bogomolov, “Dnevniki v russkoi kul’ture nachala XX veka,” in Tynia-
novskii sbornik: Chetvertye Tynianovskie chteniia, ed. M.O. Chudakova (Riga: Zinatne, 1990),
148–58. On the symbolist and near-symbolist practice of “life creation,” the aesthetic or-
ganization of behavior, see Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina
Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
8. M. Kuzmin, Dnevnik 1905–1907, ed. N. A. Bogomolov and S. V. Shumikhin (St.
Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh, 2000), 171. Subsequent page references to this edition are
given parenthetically in the text.
9. S. V. Trotsky, “Vospominaniia,” ed. A. V. Lavrov, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 10
(1994): 49. Trotsky imbues this comment with an occult mystical worldview according to
which the center of spiritual forces had moved from India to Russia, where great events
would now take place and lead all of humanity into a new era.
10. Olga Deschartes, “Vvedenie” (Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:88).
11. “V. I. Ivanov V. Ya. Bryusovu 29.8.1905,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo 85 (1976): 479.
12. Ivanov in his laudatory review of Petersburg “Vdokhnovenie uzhasa,” in Ivanov,
Sobranie sochinenii, 4:621. See also Lidiya Ivanova, Vospominaniia. Kniga ob otse, ed. John
Malmstad (Moscow: RIK “Kul’tura,” 1992), 35; and Andrey Bely, Nachalo veka (Mos-
cow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1933), 326–27. In Mapping Petersburg, my itinerary
“The Tower—Housing Modernity and Modernism” describes the bohemian interiors
and daily life of the Ivanov apartment. See also Andrey Shishkin, “Simposion na peter-
burgskoi bashne v 1905–1906 gg,” in Russkie piry, ed. D. S. Likhachev, Al’manakh Kanun 3
(St. Petersburg: RAN IRLI, 1998), 273–352.
13. Peterburgskie vedomosti reported the following day that on “August 29, after
midday, cannon fire was again warning the capital about the water that had started
to rise” and continued with descriptions of the trouble the flood caused in the city,
especially for the inhabitants of the islands (208, [August 30, 1905], 3).
14. V. G. Belinsky, “Peterburg i Moskva,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (Moscow:
Izd. Akademii nauk SSSR, 1955), 385–413. See also Stiven Lovell (Stephen Lovell),
“Dosug v Rossii: ‘svobodnoe’ vremia i ego ispol’zovanie,” Antropologicheskii forum 2 (2005):
136–73.
15. Belinsky, “Peterburg i Moskva,” 389–90.
16. Ibid., 398.
17. Ibid., 399.
18. Lovell, “Dosug v Rossii,” 157–60.
19. In 1896 the growing urban population forced the government to ban fairs in the
city centers because of congestion (Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at
the End of the Tsarist Era [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003], 195).
20. Lovell, “Dosug v Rossii,” 158.
21. Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005), 89–108. For the relationship between movement in
the city and production of knowledge, see Polina Barskova on the “physiology of Peters-
burg” tradition and Evgeny Grebyonka in this volume.
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 213

22. Gleber, Art of Taking a Walk, 52–53.

23. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 1–26.
24. Ibid., 84–85.
25. Ibid., 3, 25.
26. N. F. Khomutetsky, Peterburg—Leningrad: Istoriko-arkhitekturnyi ocherk (Leningrad:
Lenizdat, 1958), 72.
27. V. Mikhnevich, ed., Peterburg ves’ na ladoni (St. Petersburg: Izdanie knigopro-
davtsa K. N. Plotnikova, 1874), 118–19.
28. I. A. Ponomaryov, “Tavrichesky sad,” Istoriia Peterburga 4, no. 14 (2003): 21.
29. V. O. Mikhnevich, “Peterburgskie sady i ikh etnografiia,” in Iazvy Peterburga:
Sbornik gazetnogo fol’klora kontsa XIX—nachala XX vv., ed. L. Ya. Lurye (Leningrad, 1990),
17–18, quoted in Ponomaryov, “Tavrichesky sad,” 22.
30. P. Grabbe, Okna na Nevu (St. Petersburg, 1995), quoted in Ponomaryov, “Tavri-
chesky sad,” 23; D. A. Zasosov and V. I. Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga 1890–1910-kh godov: Za-
piski ochevidtsev (St. Petersburg: Lenizadt, 1999), 35, 278.
31. Ponomaryov, “Tavrichesky sad,” 23. For revolutionary activities in Petersburg,
see Alexis Peri and Christine Evans in this volume.
32. This note is dated June 25, 1909; such expressions of loneliness became espe-
cially prevalent after the death of Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal.
33. The image of a tower appears on the cover of Ivanov’s book Po zvezdam (To the
Stars, 1909). Its designer, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, tells of a caricature he drew of Ivanov,
in which he used the idea of a tower reaching the heavenly heights: “He was tall and
meager and all the time somehow aiming forward. Moreover, he had a habit of raising
himself on tiptoe when talking with someone. Once I drew him in this pose, as if he were
on the edge of the Tower and ‘taking off ’ to the stars with small wings on his heels—but
I only showed this awfully malignant caricature to my friend Syunnerberg; after all, I
was afraid Vyacheslav Ivanovich would be offended” (M. Dobuzhinsky, Vospominaniia
[New York: Put’ zhizni, 1976], 376).
34. “And just as we went then to the people with tidings of joy from Kormchie Zvezdy,
so we now go with tidings of joy of the Great Bell and testament of the Flame” (Ivanov,
Sobranie sochinenii, 2:771).
35. “[ T]he solitude of an artist is a basic fact in the latest history of ideas” (Ivanov,
Sobranie sochinenii, 1:711).
36. Konstantin Erberg (K. A. Syunnerberg), “Vospominaniia,” ed. S. S. Gre-
chishkin and A. V. Lavrov, Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1977 god
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), 128.
37. See the caricature in Bely’s memoirs: “it’s like a small museum, or a preserve;
when you enter it, you forget which country and era you are in; everything becomes
crooked; the day becomes night and night becomes day” (Bely, Nachalo veka, 321), or
G. A. Tots, “‘Zarevo bol’shogo goroda . . .’ Stranitsy iz vospominanii,” Literaturnoe
obozrenie 11 (1988): 110–11.
38. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Exposé [of
1939],” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 19.
39. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 36.
40. Ibid., 92.
214    

41. One place from which to admire panoramic views of the city was the cupola of
St. Isaac’s Cathedral, whose 562 steps one could climb for 1 ruble for 1–5 persons and 20
kopeks for each additional person. See Stiliana Milkova’s itinerary on Baedeker’s and
Otto Keller’s guidebooks to Petersburg in Mapping Petersburg.
42. Alexander Kobak and Dmitry Severyukhin, “‘Bashnia’ na Tavricheskoy (bio-
grafiia doma),” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo 1 (1987): 35. Vera Shvarsalon, Lidiya’s daughter
from a previous marriage, remembers her first arrival at the Tower in 1907, after her
mother’s death: “The view from Mom’s room—the one she had described [in letters],
so marvelous, to the river and further to its other side and even to the beautiful palazzo
behind . . . [illegible] down by the Neva, beyond Okhta—was largely ruined by the big
building erected on Tverskaya Street” (Nikolay Bogomolov, “Zagor’e,” Toronto Slavic
Quarterly 25 [2008], http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/25/bogomolov25.shtml).
43. Mikhnevich, Peterburg ves’ na ladoni, 67. It is worth remembering that Peters-
burg’s genius loci according to Antsiferov is The Bronze Horseman (N. Antsiferov, Dusha Pe-
terburga [ Leningrad: Leningradskii komitet literatorov, Agenstvo LIRA, 1990], 15, 20).
44. Ivanov also dated his poem “Palatka Gafiza” as “March 8, 1906, in Petro-
bagdad” (Sobranie sochinenii, 2:738). On the Hafiz Society, see Nikolay Bogomolov,
“Peterburgskie gafizity,” in Mikhail Kuzmin: Stat’i i materialy (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, 1995), 67–98.
45. V. N. Toporov, “K ‘Peterburgskomu’ lokusu Kuzmina,” in Peterburgskii tekst
russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2003), 553.
46. As John Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov note, it was the diary that “allowed
him to become a spectator of his life and that of others and thus allowed distance from
both” ( John E. Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art [Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999], 122).
47. Cf. Baudelaire, who notes in regard to painting that the velocity of modern life
favors, even requires certain “quick” genres: “but there is in the trivial things of life, in
the daily changing of external things, a speed of movement that imposes upon the artist
an equal speed of execution [. . .] pastel, etching, aquatint have provided their succes-
sive quotas to this vast dictionary of modern life in libraries, in art collector’s portfolios
and in the humblest shop windows” (Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern
Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972], 393–94).
48. M. Kuzmin, Dnevnik 1934 goda, ed. Gleb Morev (St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh,
1998), 94.
49. Kuzmin writes here about the apartment of his relatives.
50. Cf., “Benois and his confreres tended to focus almost exclusively on art and
architecture in their discussions of the past. They might occasionally recount a titillating
anecdote about the imperial family or describe a picturesque scene, but, for the most
part, historical events and the spectacle of daily life in the capital interested them rela-
tively little” (Emily D. Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of
Kraevedenie [University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006], 46).
51. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006), 69–70. I thank Lucas Stratton for pointing out Ahmed’s book to
me.
52. The reference to binoculars could be an instance of self-irony, or alternatively,
it could relate to his family, whose excitement about the 1905 Revolution he did not
Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 215

share. Eventually Kuzmin himself joined the Union of Russian People (Soiuz russkogo na-
roda), a reactionary anti-Semitic organization that carried out pogroms and that repre-
sented genuine Russia for Kuzmin (Malmstad and Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin, 89–91).
53. On the rise of hooliganism, see Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and
Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
54. Malmstad and Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin, 85.
55. Ibid., 121.
56. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 125.
57. In 1900, 63 percent of the population of St. Petersburg belonged to the peasant
class, the vast majority of whom had only recently migrated to the city and who still pre-
served elements of the traditional lifestyle (S. A. Smith, “Masculinity in Transition:
Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St. Petersburg,” Russian Masculinities in History and
Culture, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey [Basingtoke,
England: Palgrave, 2002], 95). On same-sex eros in patriarchal urban environments,
e.g., workshops and bathhouses, see Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia:
The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001),
22–29.
58. Interestingly, Kuzmin in a preface to the Russian edition of Jules Barbey
d’Aurevilly’s Du Dandysme et de George Brummell parallels religious rituals and fashion: “the
difference between the two is just that the first concerns practices in church and is sanc-
tified by centuries, whereas the latter is related to dress and is consecrated only by
decades, if not just minutes—but their essence is the same” (Mikhail Kuzmin, Mikhail
Kuzmin: Proza i esseistika v trekh tomakh, vol. 3, Esseistika. Kritika [ Moscow: Agraf, 2000],
493).
59. Walter Nouvel, with whom Kuzmin lived for a short period in the summer of
1906, worked in the Ministry of the Imperial Court and lived on Galernaya Street, an
area popular among higher state officials. Konstantin Somov lived with his family in a
spacious apartment in the nearby area of Kolomna.
60. Although it does not mention Kuzmin, the jubilee album for the tenth anniver-
sary of Vienna is an excellent evocation of the restaurant’s bohemian atmosphere, as
well as of its day-to-day operation (Desiatiletie restorana “Vena.” Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi
sbornik [St. Petersburg: 1913]). On restaurants of different categories in turn-of-the-
century Petersburg, see also Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 122–26.
61. Healey, Homosexual Desire, 29–30.
62. Other areas included the Passage, certain parts of Nevsky Prospect and the
Fontanka Embankment, the Zoological Gardens, Summer Gardens, Konnogvardeysky
Boulevard, and Alexander Gardens. See Healey, Homosexual Desire, 29–44; V. P.
Ruadze, K sudu . . ! Gomoseksual’nyi Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 1908); and V. V. Bersen’ev
and A. R. Markov, “Politsiia i gei: Epizod iz zhizni epokhi Aleksandra III,” in Aleksei
Markov, Chto znachit byt’ studentom: Raboty 1995–2002 godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, 2005), 184–209.
63. A nickname for one of the park locations was “pearl necklace”; bathhouse
attendants were called les nayades, and soldiers, les vivandières (Kuzmin, Dnevnik 1905–1907,
167, 173, 179).
64. Note that in Kuzmin’s diary the language of love and eroticism is French. See
Lucas Stratton’s itinerary regarding the symbolic value of things French in early
twentieth-century Russian culture in Mapping Petersburg.
216    

65. Bersen’ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 191.

66. Cf. the critique of the myth of invisibility in George Chauncy, Gay New York:
Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 3.
A contemporary work based on the myth of invisibility and of homosexual Petersburg is
K. K. Rotikov, Drugoi Peterburg (St. Petersburg: Liga Plius, 1998).
67. Bersen’ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 194. On the sports facilities see also
Ponomaryov, “Tavrichesky sad,” 23.
68. See Olga Matich, “The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and Practice,” in
Paperno and Delaney, Creating Life, 24–50.
69. According to Kuzmin, Ivanov asked Kuzmin to take him to the park and show
him his lover but then “took fright of the crowd and of Nouvel” (Dnevnik 1905–1907, 180).
Despite Kuzmin’s usually quite negative attitude toward Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal, he
seemed to have felt an unusual closeness with her while strolling in the Tauride Gardens
because she was eager to join him in his “underworld” escapades (157–58).
70. See, e.g., the poems “In the Tower” (“Na bashne”) and “Bronze Horseman”
(“Mednyi vsadnik”).
71. On philosophical models for family life in symbolist circles see Matich, “Sym-
bolist Meaning of Love.” Recall also Belinsky’s notions of Moscow as “the city of patri-
archal family life” and Petersburg as the city that loves the street and strolling. Kuzmin,
although from Yaroslavl, seemed to be more of a “Petersburg type” in this regard.
72. Bely, Nachalo veka, 313.
73. Mikhail Kuzmin, Pokoinitsa v dome: Chetvertaia kniga rasskazov (St. Petersburg:
Izdanie M. Semenova, 1914). I disagree with V. N. Toporov, who situates this story on
Vasilievsky Island, where Kuzmin spent his childhood (Toporov, “K ‘Peterburgskomu’
lokusu Kuzmina,” 553). In 1907 Kuzmin lived for some time in the same building as the
Ivanovs, at the Zvantseva sisters’ apartment one floor below. He lived with the Ivanovs
in the summer of 1908 and from July 1909 until 1912. The title story of the collection,
published in 1913 in Russkaia mysl’, was based on the story of Vyacheslav Ivanov and
Vera Shvarsalon and finalized the break between Kuzmin and the Ivanovs.
74. Kuzmin, Pokoinitsa v dome, 172.
 8
The Button and the Barricade
Bridges in Paris and Petersburg

       

During the opening ceremonies of the Trinity Bridge (Troitsky most) in St. Pe-
tersburg,1 P. I. Lelyanov, then mayor of the Russian capital, eagerly presented
Nicholas II with an electric button capable of engaging the newly finished
edifice’s drawbridge apparatus.2 According to the illustrated weekly journal
Niva, this presentation occurred on May 16, 1903, when the inauguration of this
somewhat belatedly constructed bridge coincided with St. Petersburg’s bicen-
tennial celebrations.
Despite photographic evidence of the button, we can assume neither that
its real functionality—if it did work—reached beyond the scope of the cere-
mony nor that during the ceremony it alone engaged the drawbridge mecha-
nism. We can, however, investigate how the button radiates meaning as a
marker of modernity, of tsarist power, and of a new way for the negotiation of
various narratives through Petersburg. By narrative I mean not only the repre-
sentation or recounting of movement through the city but also the imposition of
control over that movement.3 In this context I interpret the button as a symbol
of the grander “narrative” of power that maintains the legitimacy and continu-
ity of the Romanovs’ reign. The button itself could be understood as a point of
narrative relaying, a transition linking a sole digit of the Russian sovereign to
the activation of an electronic system, even if only in a virtual sense. The activa-
tion of the drawbridge would have embodied the rapidity and instantaneity of

217
218      

modern time; the concentration—or perhaps more precisely, the reduction—

of manpower to a single, simple movement of a minor appendage would have
suggested technological innovation that resembled the kind of electronic ad-
vancement characteristic of our time. Increasingly, electric energy and the mo-
torized systems that it propelled began to supplant and to trivialize the neces-
sity of sheer human strength, especially the collective human force that would
otherwise have been indispensable to elevate the movable section of a bridge.4
The button could also be seen as reifying the absolute power of the tsar admin-
istering his will to separate the bridge as an act of technological agency, thus
compressing and blurring the distinctions between the expression of human
will (in word or, in this case, in action), the desired outcome of the will, and
its subsequent achievement. In this sense, the modern narrative of technology
affords a sort of demiurgic expediency to the human body wielding the button.
By serving as the first to press the button, the tsar conflates his autonomous will
with the application of modern technology. This gesture celebrates the Trinity
Bridge and the city of St. Petersburg as much as it implies the modernization of
state authority, which seems to be transformed from the heavy-handed imple-
mentation of control into the gentle, momentous (but no less commanding or
effective) posing of the finger upon the button.5
In this essay I will consider the Alexander III Bridge in Paris and the Trinity
Bridge in St. Petersburg as loci of political legitimacy and authority, symbolic
and real, and as places from which emerge narratives that may redirect or arrest
larger scenarios of social order and imperial power. The two bridges shed light
on the bridge as a spatial and textual metaphor of narrative continuity, in this
instance between royal relatives (the Romanovs), between nations (France and
Russia), and between rulers (Alexander III and Nicholas II as well as the tsar
and the French president). In this light the two bridges instantiate the power
and longevity of the state, especially of Russian imperial might mapped upon
the cityscapes of Paris and St. Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century.
Registering trends in turn-of-the-century urban design and technological
advancement, the bridge became a metaphor for new systems of meaning (aes-
thetic, economic, and most importantly for this essay, mythical, political, famil-
ial, and social) grafted onto the urban infrastructure. In “Building Dwelling
Thinking,” Martin Heidegger submits that the bridge refashions our percep-
tion of space by serving as a point of reference, as a location. Heidegger sug-
gests that by uniting two riverbanks, “[t]he bridge designedly causes them to lie
across from each other.” He writes that “the bridge does not first come to a lo-
cation to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the
bridge. [. . .] By this site are determined the localities and ways by which a
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i c a de 219

Illustration of Trinity Bridge’s rotating drawbridge section (Le Génie Civil, 1905)

space is provided for.”6 In other words, the bridge lends a material marker to
the abstract “placelessness” of natural space. It maps space by insisting on the
difference between two sides of a river as much as it insists on connecting the
two. Yet the bridge hardly seems to represent only practical aims: as a symbol
of marriage, brotherhood, diplomacy, or otherwise, it inherits and maps its own
multiple meanings and diverse metaphors. The bridge may be of purely utili-
tarian worth or—in the case of the Alexander III Bridge in Paris and the Trin-
ity Bridge in St. Petersburg—it may mean a medium for movement as well as a
monument and memorial. Literature takes up the underlying indeterminate-
ness of the bridge and often exploits and exacerbates it by disclosing its inlaid
narrative potential as a vital link between story lines and also as a node of
potential narrative peripety.
In this sense the bridge’s importance with respect to narrative entails tran-
sition or mediation: the bridge acts as a medium and springboard for the subse-
quent unfolding, stalling, or redirecting of narrative movement. After Nicholas
II pressed the button and the elevated section of the bridge fully descended, the
celebration of the St. Petersburg bicentennial proceeded over to the Petersburg
Side of the Neva River, where the royal family entered a pavilion honoring the
deceased Tsar Alexander III.7 Outside such ceremonial semiotics, the ascent
and descent of the drawbridge section of the Trinity Bridge enabled a number
of narrative developments, some of which were relevant to the urban econ-
omy.8 Vessels flowing unimpeded through the bridge’s hoisted gate served as
220      

indices of the progress of commercial and military endeavors. For that matter,
a crucial function of any urban bridge is its facilitation of other narratives of
intracity travel, be they pedestrian or vehicular, such as the tram crossing Trin-
ity Bridge.9 As a maritime city of islands, St. Petersburg relied on bridges and
the indispensable mechanism of the drawbridge in order to maintain the suc-
cessful alternation of traffic across the bridge and along the Neva below.10 Such
modes of movement promoted the social, economic, and political continuity of
the city. In some cases, however, the bridge advanced narratives of disintegra-
tion, for it could facilitate the movement of revolutionaries and bomb-throwing
terrorists through the city, as it did in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg.
Literal and figurative bridge-building in and between Russia and France
flourished between 1892 and 1903. In 1892 Alexander III established a new po-
litical entente between the two countries in the event of war with Germany or
Italy. This agreement patched up weary diplomatic ties that had lingered dur-
ing the eighty years following Napoleon’s defeat in 1812. Nicholas II, following
his father’s example, pursued a stronger relationship with France as the new
century approached, especially in the face of English imperial intention. On
October 7, 1896, Nicholas, along with the empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, was
present for the ground-laying ceremonies of the Pont Alexandre III in Paris.
This structure was conceived both to commemorate newfound diplomatic ties
with Russia—and their promulgators—and to greet the century as one of the
centerpieces at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900.11 Not long after the
Alexander III Bridge completed its steel-clad leap across the Seine, the Troitsky
most, designed by the French company Batignolles, was ceremoniously opened
above the Neva’s murky currents in 1903.12 With its clusters of ornate tri-globed
lamps, the bridge reflects the modernist aesthetics of the time and bears re-
markable resemblance to the Pont Mirabeau, another bridge completed in Paris
in 1897 and designed by Jean Résal and Amédée Alby, the chief architects of
the Alexander III Bridge. The French president Félix Faure was present in St.
Petersburg for the laying of the first stone of Trinity Bridge on August 12, 1897.
Trinity Bridge served as evidence of Russia’s aesthetic affinities for French
design, especially in modern urban space. Aesthetic predilection followed upon
state alliances: the political rapprochement with France impacted the maps of
Paris and Petersburg so much that the two capitals became the hosts of struc-
tures and toponyms symbolic of the Franco-Russian alliance.13
Trinity Bridge, like its precursor in Paris, honored and embodied the union
of the two countries; unlike the Alexander III Bridge, a monumental emblem
of political bond building between nations, the Trinity Bridge memorialized
the twenty-fifth anniversary of Maria Fyodorovna’s marriage to the late Tsar
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i c a de 221

The Alexander III Bridge as illustrated in a Russian journal (Stroitel’, 1899)

Alexander III.14 By dint of its designation, the Alexander III Bridge symbolized
the majesty of one individual’s political might and will to cooperation. Thus in
the case of the Parisian structure, urban architecture anticipated a new century
of diplomatic solidarity initiated by the late tsar and evoked the bridge’s politi-
cal resonance. In Petersburg the bridge, although modern and forward looking
in design, was meant to invoke a solemn recollection of the past and to inscribe
upon the urban map not just a metaphor of diplomatic and aesthetic zeal but
also a monument to two individuals’ spiritual intimacy. The Trinity Bridge also
accrued religious significance thanks to the eponymous monastery to which it
led. Trinity Bridge’s significance as a spiritual symbol and the Alexander III
222      

Bridge’s geopolitical suggestiveness show how the external features of urban

space as represented by a bridge may aspire to chronicle—to instantiate in
space—matrimonial and diplomatic alignment via tangible constructions.
Joining nations meant splicing the myths and histories of two countries.
When José-Maria de Hérédia composed alexandrines to Alexander on the oc-
casion of the initial stonelaying ceremony for the Alexander III Bridge on Oc-
tober 7, 1896, he took to the rhetoric of the ode to realize the task.15 Hérédia
had already achieved renown as a stringer of sonnets and as an impeccable
practitioner of the Parnassian aesthetic, but on this occasion he departed from
the antiquity and Renaissance motifs of his recently published Trophées (1893) in
order to intone both deference to the tsar and confidence in a firm diplomatic
future between France and Russia. The ode rigorously adhered to a blend of
classical and neoclassical French conventions of prosody. It is declaimed, just as
classical usage would demand. Hérédia’s exaltation of the tsar and his insis-
tence on formal precision demonstrated the ideological import of neoclassical
genres as the most appropriate oratorical expression of an imperial state’s
affairs. In the wake of such a poetic dissident as Rimbaud, who mangled the
alexandrine and extolled the Paris Commune of 1871, the odic genre stood out
as an anachronistic vestige of a bygone nonrepublican France. Hérédia merged
the odic form with a content oriented toward the evolution of the Russian state,
the tsar, and his posterity and diplomatic legacy, using the alexandrine as Pierre
de Ronsard would have preferred: he engaged its semiotic worth as a meter
germane to the establishment of textual monuments and verse-invested myth-
making.16 If Hérédia’s alexandrine magnified the bridge’s symbolic meaning,
one could note that in the Russian tradition Alexander Pushkin composed his
celebrated “Exegi Monumentum” (1836) in a Russian variant of the same
meter.17 Pushkin—whose first name is not insignificant in this matter—boasted
that the scale of his literary achievement had eclipsed even the imposing city
sight in Palace Square that is the Alexandrian Column, which was designed by
Frenchman Auguste de Montferrand and itself a symbol of military might.18 In
the analogy between Hérédia and Pushkin, we glimpse an intriguing coinci-
dence, and in the case of Pushkin even competition, between metrical form and
the monumental cityscape.
Hérédia opted for the alexandrine and the ode in an attempt to access not
only a laudatory register but also to instill the moment with the poignancy of
Russia’s mythical, as well as European (not to imply an equivalency of these
two words), grandeur. The poet tapped into Petersburg’s legendary past in the
ode’s closing lines by way of a pun:
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i c a de 223

Come! May the future forever impose upon you

The glorious surname of your ancestor Peter,
Noble emperor, you will pose the great stone,
Firm granite where Peace shall reign!19

Hérédia evokes Peter the Great, the figurative progenitor of Russia’s would-be
European urban offspring, as a metonym of the bridge, as the initial “stone” in
the bridge of diplomacy between Europe and Russia. Biblical connotations ac-
company this secular act, since pierre (stone) is a homonym of the proper noun
Pierre, the French for the Russian Pyotr or the English Peter.20 Petersburg’s mythic
beginning, also imagined as a conception—an idea borne out into space—
symbolizes Russia’s European birth, and this past emerges as a reenactment of
Petersburg’s inception myth on the streets of Paris.21 Along the banks of the
Seine, Nicholas II consummates, as it were, his father’s diplomatic aspirations
while also recreating, within the capital of French civilization and culture, the
mythical stonelaying of Peter the Great’s namesake city, though both the tsar’s
name and his polis refer originally to St. Peter the Apostle. Moreover, Hérédia’s
deictic and proleptic reference to “this bridge” conflates the idea of the bridge
with its future completion and its material reality and imbues a single stone
with enormous and guaranteed creative potential.22 Hérédia’s wholesale ac-
ceptance of the myth of Petersburg’s beginning provides the fodder for an odic
embellishment of that very act, allowing him to transfer it to the present cele-
bration and to cast Peter’s resuscitated deed into the context of transnational
ceremony. Since the poem erects the mythic bridge before it has been built, this
textual monument effectively underscores the interrelation between “poetic
architecture” and the salient urban structures that it aestheticizes—and “sur-
mounts,” in the case of Pushkin’s proud assertion.
Positioned as a thematic cusp of Hérédia’s poem, the bridge fulfills a two-
fold role both within the ode and on the metatextual level. As metaphor, its
rhetorical function is to represent the Romanov family’s continuity, not only in
the sense of a resilient and legitimate bloodline but also in its inherited obliga-
tion to secure the well-being of the Russian state within and beyond its borders.
Hérédia uses words infused with religious sentiment to exalt the sanctity of
genealogical continuity and of diplomacy as a fraternal bond between rulers,
while also lending great deference to the paternal.23 Through his praise of “fa-
ther figures” like Peter the Great and especially Alexander III, Hérédia histori-
cizes and authenticates Nicholas II’s inherited duty to preserve ties with France
and, as a performance of his family’s legacy, to place the bridge’s first stone. It
224      

is not surprising that after the completion of the Alexander III Bridge in 1900,
the Avenue Nicolas II, which led to the bridge during the world’s fair, was de-
scribed in a Russian architectural journal “as the main artery” by which the
eager fairgoers reached the Place de la Concorde.24 Hérédia’s ode fleshed out
the bloodlines of history, myth, and imperial power inscribed onto Parisian city
space just as the intersection of real city linkages, as in the above example, reified
royal genealogy through the nomenclature of streets.

B ely ’s M yt hic Bridge a nd t he Ba r r i c a d e

In the endnotes to their translation of Petersburg, John Malmstad and Robert

Maguire comment on the Petersburg Bridge, known today as Trinity Bridge,
with a curious suggestion. The translators underscore the importance of this
particular bridge in Petersburg while also tempering their comparison of city and
text by suggesting that “Bely often seems to have a ‘mythic’ bridge in mind, not
any real one.”25 What this could mean and what Bely’s text could purport re-
garding the “mythic” bridge will be the focus of attention for the remainder of
this essay.26
We might begin to understand what such a bridge may be by first bringing
to the fore a number of mythical rivers in Petersburg. As a point of departure
we might view the bridge as an emblem of resistance—of recalcitrant human
volition—with respect to the river.27 Different types of mythological rivers
figure in Bely’s Petersburg. Within the novel’s opening pages the narrator evokes
the “waters of Lethe” that flow beneath Petersburg’s “black and gray bridges”
(24).28 It is not the only river of Hades mentioned in the novel: in chapter 7 the
narrator evokes the Cocytus, the river of lamentation and a tributary of the
Acheron (river of sorrow), as well as the Styx, the river of hate that separates
the world of the living from that of the dead. Here Apollon Apollonovich is in
his senatorial office (uchrezhdenie). This is where he imagines himself abducted
by the grim ferryman Charon, just as the goddess Persephone was abducted by
Pluto, the ruler of Hades (myths can be metaphors of other myths in Bely’s
text!). Apollon Apollonovich is cast into the abyss, the Greeks’ mythic abyss
tellingly named Tartar, and engulfed by the careening “waves” of paperwork,
which the text images as the fiery currents of the Phlegethon—indeed, the river
of fire in the Underworld (333). This passage conflates the Greeks’ mythical
representation of hell with the oppressive tedium of the bureaucrat’s everyday
life. Bely’s remetaphorization of the already-metaphorized waterways of Greek
mythology transports us back to the very heart of the metropolis, where the
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i c a de 225

streets do flood and the bureaucracy overflows with documents; we sway from
the mythic realm of the dead to the bureaucracy at the center of Petersburg.29
This is all to suggest that we cannot understand the meaning of the bridge with-
out considering the mythical value ascribed to the waterway that it obviates, a
mythical value in which the bridge also participates.
The famed lexicographer Vladimir Dal’ remarked that in Russian fairy tales
Kalinov bridge (Kalinov most) often figures as a pathway across a swamp.30 In
Slavic mythology—in the epic tales of the byliny—Kalinov bridge hovers
above the foul waters of the river Smorodinka, a fiery river comparable to the
Greek Phlegethon.31 This is where we may begin to understand the “mythic
bridge” of Petersburg, drawing parallels between the swampy, bacilli-infested
waters of the Neva and the Smorodinka, as well as between the Neva and the
rivers of Hades. In the byliny, Kalinov bridge can represent an intermediary or
liminal space upon which the forces of good and evil encounter one another or
the meeting ground for the world of the living and that of the dead. In folklore
the valiant knight (vitiaz’ ), or bogatyr’, battles an evil spirit (nechistaia sila) on Kali-
nov bridge. In both instances the imagined bridge provides a place of encoun-
ter for other abstracted, often absolute and oppositional, forces.
In Petersburg, Trinity Bridge becomes the sight of a sinister and sensational
nocturnal spectacle:

Only in one place untouched by chaos, where during the day Trinity Bridge is
unfurled, enormous diamondlike nests grew hazy above a sparkling swarm of
ringed, luminous snakes; and curling up and uncurling, the snakes dashed out-
ward in scintillant succession, and then, having dived downward, ascended to
the surface looking like stellar strings. Nikolay Apollonovich stared [zagliadelsia]
at the strings. (122)

A place marker of civilization by day, the bridge at night dissolves into resplen-
dent, spiraling and uncurling serpentine clusters of light. This dazzling, lumi-
nescent snake makes for an unsettling and stunning image. From the snake, a
creature so devilishly suggestive, radiates an almost celestial light. In the end
the swampy Neva mirrors not the stars but the serpentine lights’ starlike reflec-
tion. Heaven and earth seem to change places, and this phantasmagoric inver-
sion occurs across a structure whose materiality has receded into a sinister
darkness. Light suffuses the vitreous water in such a way that it becomes an at-
tribute of the river as much as of the bridge and, by analogy, of the sky; instead
of opposing one another, the illuminated bridge and the river act together in
mesmerizing concert. Once night renders the bridge materially indistinct, it be-
comes scaffolding for the splicing of disparate modernist metaphors and optical
226      

illusions, albeit ones forcefully distracting, bearing their own disconcerting

claims to materiality. As noted in the introduction to this volume, swarming
serves as Bely’s descriptor of his creative output—the novel—in its inceptive
state. Swarming suggests unrestrained creative pulsation and the emergence of
new visual forms, which paradoxically emanate from the static, but electrified
and visually misleading, medium of the bridge.
By day the bridge constitutes an ostensible index of civilization and a node
of networked space over the unstable river waters. Oftentimes in Petersburg the
narrator or the characters find their gaze riveted on the bridge as though by an
irresistible ocular inertia (in the previous passage Nikolay Apollonovich could
not help but stare at the structure’s mesmerizing lights).
B. M. Kirikov offers a modern-day description of the view from Trinity
Bridge: “[i]t is here that with especial force one may get a sense of the spatial
expanse and the precise organization of perspectives essential to the city.”32
The view from the bridge evokes a sense of the strict structural regularity of
Petersburg and the strength of this impression leads us to wonder whether the
city itself is so structured, or whether its precise geometry imposes organiza-
tion upon our eyes. The bridge does provide a different platform for viewing
urban space than does the street and offers a different perspective than the vista
from above.33 From the vantage point of the bridge, unsolid elements—air and
water—become all the more perceptible. These elemental forces contrast
with the bridge’s “cast-iron” rigidity (as in chugunnyi most ), although despite its
weighty materiality, the bridge seems already precariously poised at the “edge
of the earth” (55). Mention of the bridge often entails a reference to water
(“greenish bacilli-infested water”) and to wind (“cold wind of the near-Neva”),34
elements unstable and suggestive of an underlying volatility of material integ-
rity.35 Nikolay Apollonovich has contemplated suicide on Trinity Bridge: a
plunge into the abyss of the Neva underscores the proximity of life and death
provided by the structure, as well as the possibility of committing the body to
the domain of liquid, amorphous elements. Here are his words: “O, grand
bridge glowing with electricity! O, green waters teeming with bacilli! I recall
one fateful moment; on a September night I leaned across your damp railings;
and in a flash; my body would have fled into the fog. . . .” (55, 214). This utter-
ance suggests an analogy between the deep waters of the Neva and Peters-
burg’s ubiquitous fog that is capable of engulfing and extracting the body from
view, an act tantamount to doing away with life in general.
A mythical bridge therefore proves to be a rich concept, one that is irre-
ducible to a single meaning or opposition. A bridge draws its mythical conno-
tation from the potent idea of a collision, merger, or reconciliation of opposites:
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i ca de 227

all bridges imply a fantasy of enjoining. The drawbridge, however, instantiates

a heightened anxiety of connection—one might even say that it belies a fear that
the bridge-myth of connection could come true. Armed with a drawbridge—
a contraption far too prosaic to appear in the stuff of folklore and epic tales—
the modern bridge takes on a new valency connoting toggled connections and
control. We could imagine the drawbridge as something akin to a surreal door,
hinged between city space on the one side and the river depths on the other.
Thus we could also view the bridge as a locus where seemingly united or whole
entities fall apart, disintegrate, or just disappear. We might recall here the grip-
ping scene in Sergey Eisenstein’s film October, where the horse, teetering on the
edge of the drawbridge, eventually plummets into the Neva’s engulfing cur-
rent.36 The drawbridge, like a door, casts into relief stark contrasts, exposing the
gaping abyss of nature as the only alternative to life in the city at the other end
of the bridge.
In the throes of fear-driven contemplation of Petersburg, Apollon Apollo-
novich imagines the city’s bridges as grafted upon its many disparate islands
and as the sole guarantees of stability and immobility, inhibiting the islands
from floating away: “Apollon Apollonovich did not want to think anymore:
restless islands—crush them, crush them! Fetter them to the earth with the iron
of an enormous bridge and pierce through them with arrowed avenues in all
directions. . . .” (21). In his attempt to assign meaning to the Nikolaevsky
Bridge, the other bridge across the Neva that figures prominently in Bely’s
novel, Apollon Apollonovich confronts the alarming imperative of civilization’s
triumph over nature. The interjection “[c]rush them!” refers to Petersburg’s is-
lands and to the lower classes who reside on them—those swarming masses who
may instigate revolution. Moreover, this injunction is not the direct utterance of
Apollon but rather a discursive “stamp” reflective of the impulses associated
with Petersburg’s inception and, therefore, with the civilizing endeavors of Peter
the Great. Bridges would seem to restrict the islands, to take charge of their
imagined volatility by clasping them together and controlling them. Here the
construction of lines of communication between the islands signifies the process
of civilization: the bridge forces the natural environment—its isolated and iso-
lating islands—to adhere to an unbroken “syntax” of human connectedness.
This violence inflicted upon the islands impresses a social urgency of integration
between disparate individuals and classes so much that the revolt of the proletar-
iat can and does become likened to an elemental force or stikhiia in its own right:

Don’t let the crowd of slippery shadows in from the islands! Be afraid of island
dwellers! They have the right to settle freely in the empire: that is probably why
228      

black and damp bridges are thrown across the Lethe’s waters toward the
islands. If only they could be dismantled . . .
Too late . . .
The police did not think to separate Nikolaevsky Bridge; dark shadows fell
upon the bridge; among those shadows also fell the shadow of the stranger
upon the bridge. (24)37

Malmstad and Maguire write in their commentary to the novel that “[t]he
bridges across the Neva can be drawn to allow ships to pass or, in case of civil
emergencies, to control the flow of people from one part of the city to an-
other.”38 For us especially, this minor detail regarding the relation between the
bridge and the control of criminal activity intimates the moment of contact
between the novel’s plot and the city’s specificity. Moreover, the police’s negli-
gence to raise the drawbridge and thereby cancel the possibility of narrative
movement through space further demonstrates how, in Petersburg, narrative
authority lies in the hands (or even the finger, as we already know on a more
symbolic level, given the bridge button’s virtuality) of the authorities.
The trajectory through the city by upstart revolutionary Alexander Dud-
kin, who lives on Vasilievsky Island, would not be possible without the benefit
of bridges. It is telling that he must cross the Nikolaevsky Bridge in order to
reach the Ableukhov residence and deliver the bomb to Nikolay Apollonovich,
who had been enlisted in the revolutionary party’s (botched) parricide plot.
Nikolay’s genealogical contiguity with Apollon Apollonovich, which allows for
constant spatial proximity with his father, makes him well suited to carry out
the party’s destructive designs. And since the Ableukhov home serves as an al-
legory of both paternal and state authority—Apollon Apollonovich is, after all,
a senator and head of a government institution—we witness how the bridge
creates proximities of power by extending state authority from the imperial
center and into the proletarian islands. Dudkin, who abhors the Russian capi-
tal, remarks how “from the bridge Petersburg lunges this way with its avenue
arrows” (24, 32). Inclusion of the bridge into a visual slice of the cityscape can
activate associations with the bridge’s ambiguity—its symbolic and unstable
duality as both borderland and solid structure upon which entities collide.
“Behind himself Alexander Ivanovich left the bridge with its diamondlike
sparkles. Further, beyond the bridge . . . that very same mysterious Horseman
raised his bronze laurel wreath above the Neva” (98–99). The view of The
Bronze Horseman that Dudkin encounters on his way back to Vasilievsky Island
is reminiscent of postcard scenes and serves as a tacit index of urban architec-
ture’s ubiquity, its preexistence to the viewing subject, and its impact as such on
the subject’s psyche.39 The bridge, with its ambiguous charge, contributes to
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i c a de 229

this impact and might act in part as a symbolic pretext to the lyrical digression
on the conflicted duality of Russia that follows in the text.
Yet the focus on the statue of Peter, which is menacing to Dudkin, leads us
to wonder who really is doing the viewing, the young revolutionary or the Bronze
Horseman, a symbol of imperial might. Considering the revolutionary plot
against the senator, who embodies state authority and parental power, it implies
an impingement upon state structure as well as upon the family, which works as
a metaphor of the state. In this sense, the fantastical animation of the Bronze
Horseman, who will dash across Nikolaevsky Bridge on his way to Dudkin’s
apartment later in the novel, represents a hallucinated rebuke to Dudkin’s spa-
tial encroachment on the senator-father and an assertion of stately might against
Dudkin’s impulse to disorder. The Bronze Horseman’s only utterances to Dud-
kin imply both the familial structure of subjugation to the state and the cardinal
continuity of dynastic succession. The Horseman exclaims, “Greetings, my son!”
and then “Petro Primo Catharina Secunda.”40 With this, the Bronze Horseman
begins to melt, flowing into Dudkin in a molten stream of metal.
An emblem of power and paternal linkage, the bridge then refers to more
than itself. This referential indeterminacy of the bridge in the text enhances its
mythic, abstract status while also foregrounding the volatility of spatially and
mentally mapped referents.41 In Petersburg, in which topography is famously
fluid, it proves difficult to identify the true referent behind Bely’s “Petersburg”
or “cast-iron” bridge (Peterburgskii most, chugunnyi most ). L. K. Dolgopolov has
noted the ambiguity of the designation but submits that contextual clues lead
us to identify the “Great Petersburg bridge” (Bolshoy Peterburgsky most ) with
Nikolaevsky Bridge.42 Malmstad and Maguire, however, think otherwise, citing
the fact that Trinity Bridge joined the administrative side of the capital with the
Petersburg Side—the original island on which the city was founded—and for
that reason was often referred to as Peterburgsky most.43
The bridge, which serves as a node of movement from one point to
another, can be said to embody or encase the motion of metaphor. We have
invested the bridge as a conduit for urban traffic, and this perspective char-
acterizes the bridge in its more stable, utilitarian function. But what happens
when a surge of social unrest—Bely’s “black shadows”—halts that very move-
ment?44 After all, the drawbridge on Trinity Bridge serves as a hinge—a door
of sorts—between central and peripheral Petersburg, and in tow with these
categories, the drawbridge mediates islands housing the powerful and the
oppressed, the privileged and the socially subordinate.
The bridge can act as a space of subversion or peripety, in the idiom of our
project. Its strategic significance derives from its role as a buttress for movement,
230      

a support and a link to other possible routes, along with its potential as a tem-
porary “staging” ground for the obstruction or cessation of the very movement
it facilitates. Once outfitted with a barricade, the bridge calls attention to its own
weighty materiality, its capacity to stifle the city, and its underlying social, po-
litical, and economic import. Describing the social unrest during the dwindling
days of the Russian empire in The Last Days of Imperial Power (Poslednie dni impera-
torskoi vlasti ), Alexander Blok inevitably focuses on the bridge. The following
passage refers to the insurrections that erupted February 27, 1917, a crucial date
for the royal family:
Around one o’clock in the morning at the palace, news was received about
General Ivanov’s assignment. General Komarov, who was in charge of the
palace, asked Khabalov not to occupy the palace; Zankevich contested and
the question would have remained unresolved if the grand prince Mikhail
Alexandrovich, who did not manage to make it to Gatchina, had not stopped
by at that minute and disagreed with Komarov. At a meeting, the grand prince,
Khabalov, and Zankevich selected the Peter and Paul Fortress [as a place of
strategic defense], but the commandant’s aide Baron Stal, who had been called
to the telephone, announced that armored cars and weapons stood on Trinity
Square, while on Trinity Bridge there were barricades.45

Here the concentrated energies of political upheaval and social revolt

dislodge the authorities’ plans to establish a defensive outpost at the Peter and
Paul Fortress, which was situated on Hare Island. On a more general level, the
revolutionaries’ efforts counteract the movement of bodies and goods across
the structure. I submit that such human-led reconfiguration of bridge space
may undermine its semiotic value as a monumental assertion of the tsar’s
authority. By obstructing and fragmenting bridge space, the resurgent parties
suggestively wreak havoc on symbols with which the bridge is fraught: the tsar’s
“electrified” will as well as the embedded meaning of matrimonial and dynas-
tic endurance. The barricade embodies an active attempt to undo the imperial
expediency—and the royal family’s exclusive control over narratives of city,
country, and society—associated with the bridge and its button that triggered
the ceremonial joining of the fashionable city center with the “derelict” Peters-
burg Side, a zone of “urban limbo” at the turn of the twentieth century.46 As the
embodiment of modern architecture, technology, and “modernized” imperial
might, the bridge would assert a type of imperial narrative control over the
island were it not for the barricade and those behind it—the marginalized
masses—who aim to breach historical and political stability. Here I would like
to return to Paul Valéry’s analogy between modern mechanics and the smooth
functioning of a social mechanism. In the imperial city, the bridge is rendered
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i c a de 231

as a crucial node in the swift—albeit gruesome—deployment of state might. In

Sergey Eisenstein’s film October, produced in 1927 in honor of the decennial cel-
ebration of the revolution, the drawbridge-raising scene further illustrates this
point, for it shows how a drawbridge can reify and maintain social division.

Speaking of the Paris Commune of 1871, which for the Soviet regime came to
represent a principal model of the proletariat’s fervor to remedy social inequity
through revolt, Walter Benjamin contends that “[t]he burning of Paris was a
fitting conclusion to Haussmann’s work of destruction.”47 Burning buildings in
Paris during the Commune meant protecting barricades for the recalcitrant
working class just as the meaning of Haussmannian boulevards, before the
Commune, could be interpreted as facilitating social stability and the economic
prosperity of the bourgeoisie. Similarly, although in a very different light, the
barricade upon Trinity Bridge provides a response to the narrative of power
with which it was imbued during the Petersburg bicentennial celebrations.48 It
may be said to highlight Michel de Certeau’s contention that the bridge, “[a]s
the transgression of the limit . . . represents a departure, an attack on a state . . .
the ‘betrayal’ of an order.”49 My analysis begins with a bridge having a button
that reinforces the state and ends with a bridge having a barricade that resists
it. It charts the overlay of meaning onto the bridge through technology, author-
ity, and textual representation, an overlay that comes to a halt when the raw re-
ality of the barricade disconcerts the bridge’s insistence on unity and its prone-
ness to multiple layers of abstract meaning.
Modernist texts, such as Bely’s Petersburg, take up the question of the city
and, inevitably, the questions of social cohesion and communication with
which it is coextensive. Subtending the city/text dynamic, so important to our
project, is an implicit relationship between the author and his urban dwelling,
one that reveals the impact textual mappings may exert upon the capital city.
Paris’s Baron Haussmann and Petersburg ’s Andrey Bely both recognized the
“destructive” nature of their artistic enterprises: Benjamin notes that Hauss-
mann attributed the title “destructive artist” (artiste démolisseur) to himself,50 and
Bely famously stated in an article entitled “Art” that “my creative work is a
bomb” (tvorchestvo moe—bomba).51 By placing these two figures in parallel we are
able to consider how the reconstruction of a cityscape (in Paris) or revolution-
ary fervor against the city as a structure of aristocratic hegemony in a text
(Petersburg) finds at its core a similar irritation between society and city and the
adhesive, legitimating myths of power that would bind the two. Bely’s liter-
ary intoning of burgeoning social revolution and his generic and formal dis-
mantling of literary models—that is, the proverbial death of the novel—register
232      

Petersburg’s social reconfiguration through ideas, sounds, and aesthetic forms

and not through the literal remaking of the cityscape. One further intriguing
contrast between the symbolist writer and the urban architect lies in Hauss-
mann’s battle against the barricade and Bely’s depiction of a revolution (as
metaphor would suggest) against not only the bridge as a symbol of Peters-
burg’s inception and the imperial idea of the bridge button but also against the
buttonlike cartographic dot denoting the imperial capital’s preeminence on the
map.


1. The architecture historian B. M. Kirikov calls Trinity Bridge “tsar-bridge,”
likening it to an avenue and noting that with its 23.5-meter width and slightly more than
580-meter length, it reigned as the largest bridge across the Neva for over sixty years,
from 1903 until the completion of the Alexander Nevsky Bridge in 1965 (B. M. Kirikov,
Arkhitektura Peterburga kontsa XIX—nachala XX veka: Eklektika, Modern, Neoklassitsism [St. Pe-
tersburg: Kolo, 2006], 243). For a detailed account of the architectural features and the
construction of Trinity Bridge, see “Frantsuzskii most Petersburga” in Kirikov, Arkhitek-
tura Peterburga. It is also worth noting that the original drawbridge mechanism featured a
rotating section, not an ascending (bascule) one. See Anzhelika Likhacheva, “Troitsky
most,” http://www.opeterburge.ru/bridge_380.html.
2. The illustrated weekly journal Niva makes mention of the button in the article
“Nedelia Petra v Peterburge,” published at the time of the bicentennial festivities (Niva
21, vol. 34 [St. Petersburg: 1903], 422). Other sources express skepticism regarding the
very existence of a button. French and Russian engineering journals focus attention on
the electric drawbridge apparatus but do not allude to any button. In Iz zhizni Peterburga
1890–1910-kh godov (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1999), the authors D. A. Zasosov and V. I.
Pyzin do not confirm the button’s existence, noting that only newspapers feature it in
their accounts of the ceremony. It seems likely that if the button did exist, it functioned
symbolically as a sign of modernity rather than as the principal means for lowering and
raising the drawbridge. In this paper I will speculate as to the button’s symbolic narra-
tive meaning; I am therefore more interested in the button as an abstraction rather than
as a confirmable material fact.
3. Andrey Bely’s novel Petersburg represents movement through the city. The criti-
cal lens I construct here will consider this form of “narrative” within the parameters of
narrative control.
4. See “An Electric Drawbridge,” Science 13, no. 325 (April 26, 1889): 312–13: “[o]ne
of the latest applications of the electric motor which has excited much interest . . . is that
of the turning of drawbridges” and “it is not until recently that the motor for this pur-
pose has supplanted steam, and the slow, laborious method of the long lever worked by
three men” (312). These words serve as a preamble to a technical discussion concerning
a newly constructed electric drawbridge in Connecticut. According to the author, ap-
plying electricity to the drawbridge apparatus meant reducing traffic delays and the
need for manpower: with electricity it took only two minutes and one man to supervise
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i c a de 233

the lowering and raising of the drawbridge, while without electricity three men needed
six minutes to perform the same tasks—a holdup far too costly and tedious. Compara-
tively, the Trinity Bridge drawbridge mechanism completed one rotation in three and a
half minutes (“Le Pont Troïtsky à Saint-Pétersbourg: Commande électrique de la partie
tournante,” Le Génie civil 46.12, no. 1180 [1905]: 196).
5. Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet
in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Verso, 1997). Citing the
French poet Paul Valéry, Benjamin evokes “the smooth functioning of the social mech-
anism” while drawing an implicit parallel between the functioning of society and of
modern machinery—an idea to which I will return in my conclusion. Here it is note-
worthy that the proliferation of quick, hand-activated sequences constitutes a key to the
experience of modern life: “The invention of the match around the middle of the nine-
teenth century brought forth a number of innovations which have one thing in com-
mon: one abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps” (131). Benja-
min also underscores “the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and
the like” (132). I thank Ulla Hakanen for this reference.
6. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Rethinking Architecture, ed.
Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 105. The essay was originally written in 1951.
7. “‘Nedelia Petra’ v S.-Peterburge,” 422.
8. Following the construction of the bridge and its coextensive granite neoclassical
embankment, the Petersburg Side underwent rapid development and remains, as Kiri-
kov notes, a haven of buildings exemplary of the Russian style moderne (referring to the
Russian take on Art Nouveau) and neoclassical styles (Arkhitektura Peterburga, 259). Simi-
larly, after the Liteyny Bridge was finished in 1879, it facilitated the industrial develop-
ment of the Vyborg side (ibid., 244–45).
9. See Alyson Tapp’s “‘The Streetcar Prattle of Life’: Reading and Riding St.
Petersburg’s Trams” in this volume.
10. A. Dmitriev, “Mostovye sooruzheniia zagranitsei,” Stroitel’ (1901): 801–74. In
this extensive article published in an architectural journal, Dmitriev surveys the results
of various bridge-building competitions in Europe, America, Russia, and Australia. Be-
cause such competitions aimed to garner advancements in engineering, Dmitriev lends
particular attention to drawbridge designs, affirming that “various constructions of the
drawbridge section . . . bear[s] an almost decisive meaning for Petersburg bridges”
(804).
11. Just as Trinity Bridge functions as a crucial “narrative” node in the St. Peters-
burg bicentennial ceremonies, the Alexander III Bridge “serves as a connecting link
between the Champs-Elysées Exhibition and the Esplanade des Invalides” at the
World’s Fair (Stroitel’ 17–18 [1899]: 663; see also Karl Baedeker, Paris and Its Environs with
Routes from London to Paris, 14th ed. [ Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1900]). This edition of
Baedeker’s Paris guide opens with maps and a preamble regarding the “International
Exhibition,” mentioning an itinerary along the Avenue Nicolas II and across the Pont
Alexandre III.
12. The Trinity Bridge embodies the graceful elegance of a steel, granite, and cast-
iron design. Batignolles was one of several French companies that achieved particular
renown for its metal structures at the turn of the twentieth century and had already built
bridges in Russia by 1855. A vigorous exportation campaign beginning in 1880 led to the
234      

construction of a number of bridges outside of France, including, of course, Trinity

Bridge (Anne Burnel, La Société de construction des Batignolles de 1914–1939 : Histoire d’un déclin
[Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1995], 40).
13. A. N. Chesnokova, Inostrantsy i ikh potomki v Peterburge: nemtsy, frantsuzy, britantsy:
1703–1917: istoriko-kraevedcheckii ocherk (St. Petersburg: Satis, 2003), 204.The France-Russia
Friendship Monument was erected in honor of French President Emile Loubet’s visit to
Russia in 1902. Loubet was present for the opening ceremonies of this monument,
which portrays a personified encounter between France and Russia. The president’s
visit also prompted the renaming of the Gagarin Embankment (Gagarinskaya naberezh-
naia)—where the French embassy was located—to the French Embankment (Frantsuz-
skaya naberezhnaia), an appellation that, however, did not take hold. In Paris at the
time of the World’s Fair, the Avenue Nicolas II (now the Avenue Winston Churchill) di-
rected eager attendees toward the bridge. Kirikov enumerates a number of other topo-
nymic additions to Paris in the wake of renewed relations with Russia (Arkhitektura Peter-
burga, 247).
14. “Nedelia Petra v Peterburge,” 426.
15. As early as the twelfth century this twelve-syllable verse came to denote a pane-
gyric to Alexander the Great ( Jean-Michel Gouvard, La versification [Paris: PUF, 1999],
135). Hérédia’s “Salute to the Emperor” does not resemble the poet’s other works,
which consist primarily of meticulous sonnets on antiquity, historical figures, mythology,
and nature. This long odic tribute does not even appear in the two-volume collection of
his oeuvre; only a lapidary pair of tercets—and not mere excerpts from the “Salute” at
that—are to be found in the section “Verses of Homage and of Circumstance.” Not
representative of Hérédia’s works, the “Salute” constitutes a performance of the classi-
cal ode with its basic oratorical structure and civic import; thus it embodies the generic
criteria of homage. Hérédia channels the “language of the Gods” (la langue des Dieux)
in order to initiate the ode, reiterating the royal family’s deified status by praising the
Tsarina’s “divine tenderness” (divine douceur), and in this way he couples oratorical style
with the cult hymn commonly encountered in the invocation of a deity. One might con-
clude that by “language” Hérédia refers not only to the French tongue but also to the
ode as a proper idiom of converse with such dignified subjects.
16. Ibid., 135–36. As Gouvard notes, citing Ronsard’s 1565 treatise on French
poetry, the alexandrine was thought to suit best the solemnity and celebratory pathos of
heroic feats.
17. For more on the semantic relevance of meter and the alexandrine in represen-
tations of monuments real and textual, see Michael Wachtel, The Development of Russian
Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 254–55. Wachtel re-
marks that Pushkin uses a modified Russian alexandrine.
18. The Alexandrian Column represents a very different time in Franco-Russian
relations, namely, it harks back to Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Alexander I’s army.
It suffices to cite the first stanza of Pushkin’s poem to see how his verse targets city space
and symbolism as a rival to literary greatness: “Ia pamniatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvor-
nyi, / . . . / . . . / Voznessia vyshe on glavoiu nepokornoi / Alexandriiskogo stolpa” [ I
erected a monument to myself made not with hands / . . . / . . . / With its unruly head it
ascended higher / Than the Alexander Column] (Alexander Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii v desiati tomakh, vol. 3 [Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1957], 373).
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i ca de 235

19. “Viens! . . . Puisse l’avenir t’imposer à jamais / Le surnom glorieux de ton

ancêtre Pierre, / Noble empereur, qui vas sceller la grande pierre, / Granit inébran-
lable où siégera la Paix!” ( José-Maria de Hérédia, “‘Salut à l’empereur’: stances dites
par M. Paul Mounet de la Comédie-française à la cérémonie de la pose de la première
pierre du pont Alexandre III, devant Leurs Majestés impériales de Russie” [Paris:
A. Lemerre, 1896]).
20. The biblical intertext I have in mind is Matthew 16:18, in which Christ speaks:
“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.”
21. Regarding the textual foundations of the so-called Petersburg myth, see V. N.
Toporov, “Peterburg i peterburgskij tekst: mir, iazyk, prednaznachenie,” in Peterburgskii
tekst russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2003). Apropos Peter’s presence in Paris, it
is no myth that in the midst of the Northern Wars with Sweden the Russian emperor
traveled to Paris in 1717 in order to assert his status as the ruler of a militarily ascendant
Russia and to solidify an alliance with the French state ( Jean Béranger, “Pierre le
Grand,” in Dictionnaire du Grand Siècle, ed. François Bluche [Paris: Fayard, 1990], 1203).
22. Jean-Louis Meunier, “Circonstances et architecture ou du monosyllable dans le
Salut à l’Empereur de José-Maria de Hérédia,” Bulletin des Etudes parnassiennes 2–2 (1981).
Meunier mentions the constant demonstrative associated with pont but does not expand
upon this feature (27). He also notes how the pun on pierre playfully implies Nicholas II’s
ancestral provenance from “stone” (28).
23. The poet, recalling the war of 1812 in the fifth stanza, dismisses enmity between
the French and the Russians by citing their struggle as a necessary and anticipatory pre-
cursor to diplomatic ties and by describing the war as though the combating parties
were participating in a blood-brother ritual: “Et sur le ciel, au loin, ce Dôme éblouis-
sant, / Garde encore des héros de l’époque lointaine / Où Russes et Français en un
tournoi sans haine, / Prévoyant l’avenir, mêlaient déjà leur sang” [And far away in the
sky this dazzling Dome / Still protects the heroes of that distant time / When Russians
and Frenchmen, in hateless competition / Anticipated the future, already mingling
their blood]. The metonymic dome in these lines refers to the Invalides, the military
museum and site of Napoleon Bonaparte’s tomb, which is located on the left bank just
beyond the Alexander III Bridge. With further regard to inheritance and to the conti-
nuity of the state and family lines, see also the last four stanzas of the poem: “Car Alex-
andre, avec l’Empire t’a légué / l’honneur d’avoir conquis l’amour d’un people libre!”
[For Alexander with his Empire has bequeathed you / the honor of having conquered
the love of a free people!]; “Tsar, écoute aujourd’hui la Russie et la France / Bénir, avec
le tien, le saint nom paternal.” [Tsar, listen today to Russia and France / Blessing, along
with yours, the sacred paternal name.]; “Achève donc son oeuvre. Héritier de sa gloire,
/ De ta loyale main prends l’outil vierge encore” [Finish his work, then. Beneficiary of
his glory, / With your loyal hand take up the virgin instrument] (Hérédia, “‘Salut à
l’empereur’”).
24. Stroitel’ 17–18 (1899): 662.
25. Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malm-
stad (Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1978), 319. If not otherwise indicated, all
subsequent citations of Bely’s text are taken from Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dol-
gopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), with page citations noted in the text. All translations
are my own.
236      

26. I suggest we understand “mythic” to mean “imaginary” or “abstract” here

without neglecting to consider how folk mythology may inform both the imaginary and
the abstract.
27. Georg Simmel writes that “the bridge symbolizes the extension of our volitional
sphere over space” (“Bridge and Door,” in Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil Leach [ Lon-
don: Routledge, 1997], 66).
28. In Greek mythology the Lethe flows through the Underworld, and it sym-
bolizes forgetfulness of the earthly life left behind by those who have reached Hades.
29. According to Greek mythology, all the rivers of Hades met at the center of the
Underworld, where they formed a great marsh; Petersburg’s central and primary water-
way, the Neva, bears a hydronym that derives from the Finnish for “swamp” or
“marsh.” Maguire and Malmstad make note of this in their translation of Petersburg
(346).
30. Vladimir Dal’, “Kalina,” in Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow:
M. O. Vol’f, 1905), 191.
31. The river’s name most likely derives from the Old Church Slavonic word smrad,
meaning “stench.”
32. Kirikov, Arkhitektura Peterburga, 243.
33. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), especially 91–93. De Certeau contrasts
traversing city space at street level with taking a panoramic view of the city, understand-
ing each metaphorically as operations similar to writing and to reading, respectively. In
keeping with the problem of vantage points, I would submit that the bridge allows us to
embrace a unique vision of city space. To stand on the bridge entails a view unlike that
of the typical street-level perspective, and to stand is not “to write” in de Certeau’s par-
lance, nor does this view correspond to the all-encompassing, panoramic vision of the
reader.
34. The passages from which I draw these recurring epithets can be found on pages
56, 126, 184, 214, and 331 of the Nauka edition.
35. On this particular aspect of experiencing modernity, see Marshall Berman, All
That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
36. October: Ten Days That Shook the World, DVD, dir. Sergey Eisenstein et al. (Mos-
film Studios, 1927; Riegelsville, PA: Corinth Films, 1998).
37. Bely modified this passage for the 1922 edition of Petersburg, and here is Maguire
and Malmstad’s translation of it: “As for us, here’s what we’ll say: oh, Russian people,
oh, Russian people! Don’t let the crowd of shadows in from the islands! Black and
damp bridges are already thrown across the waters of Lethe. If only they could be dis-
mantled . . . Too late . . . And the shadows thronged across the bridge. And the dark
shadow of the stranger. Rhythmically swinging in his hand was a not exactly small, yet
not very large bundle” (13). In the 1916 edition of the text Bely explicitly identifies the
space of Petersburg as imperial, thereby highlighting the tension between the populace
and the powerful.
38. Bely, Petersburg, trans. Maguire and Malmstad, 305.
39. St. Isaac’s Cathedral, a typical postcard emblem of Petersburg, also figures in
this perspective.
40. Bely, Petersburg, trans. Maguire and Malmstad, 214.
T h e Bu t t o n a n d the B a r r i c a de 237

41. Apollon Apollonovich’s residence evinces an analogous ambiguity of location

since, as L. K. Dolgopolov notes, the senator’s residence in Petersburg is located both at
the English and the Gagarin embankments on the Neva, occupying different sides of
Admiralty Island (L. K. Dolgopolov, “Roman A. Belogo Peterburg,” in Bely, Peterburg,
610–11).
42. L. K. Dolgopolov, “Tekstologicheskie printsipy izdaniia,” in Bely, Peterburg,
632n11.
43. Bely, Petersburg, trans. Maguire and Malmstad, 319.
44. David Frisby, “Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” in Tracing Modernity: Mani-
festations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, ed. Mari Hvattum and Christian Herman-
sen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 271–90. In this article Frisby aptly refers to the im-
poverished masses as “the dark side of modernity,” a description tied to Baudelaire’s
thematic treatment of the “sickly population” (279). One might also read in Bely’s words
a reformulation of the epithet temnyi narod (the dark people), itself referring to the unedu-
cated populace, even riffraff, of Russian society.
45. Alexander Blok, “Poslednie dni imperatorskoi vlasti,” in Sobranie sochinenii v 8
tomakh, vol. 6 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1962), 242.
46. Here, I am co-opting a term from Polina Barskova’s essay “The Fluid Margins:
Flâneurs of the Karpovka River,” in this volume.
47. Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” trans. Quintin Hoare,
in Charles Baudelaire, 176.
48. Paris underwent extensive remodeling at the hands of Baron Georges-Eugène
Haussmann during the 1860s; Petersburg did not incur a similar grand-scale renovation
of city space, although structures like the Trinity Bridge bear the mark of the relation-
ship between society and city space (Maguire and Malmstad’s note on the drawbridge
proves as much). Walter Benjamin writes of Haussmann’s reforms as a bourgeois-
sponsored reconfiguration of the capital aimed at thwarting revolution. If motives of so-
cial control and the perpetuation of bourgeois ideals underlie the baron’s modifications
(“strategic beautification,” in the idiom of the time), then one might conclude that the
Russian authorities, besides appreciating the aesthetic and economic merits of Trinity
Bridge, saw in it a proper addition to impose upon the matrix of mapped imperial space.
See Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 175.
49. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 128, my emphasis.
50. Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 174.
51. Andrey Bely, “Iskusstvo,” in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie (Moscow: Respublika,
1994), 241.
 9
28 Nevsky Prospect
The Sewing Machine, the Seamstress,
and Narrative

    

Since the eighteenth century, two spires have pierced the sky of Petersburg and
punctuated its skyline. They belong to the Admiralty Building, which is at the
bottom of Nevsky Prospect and located on the right side of the Neva River, and
to the Peter and Paul Cathedral on the left side. Andrey Bely in Petersburg calls
these spires needles, although the residents of the city refer only to the Admi-
ralty spire as a needle. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the globe held
up by two women soaring over the cupola of the House of Singer on the corner
of Nevsky Prospect and the Catherine Canal introduced into the city skyline
another architectural high point that was neither a house of worship nor a gov-
ernment building.1 It was affiliated with commerce and the growing role of
foreign investment in the Russian economy. The needle advertised by Singer—
the sharp instrument of the modern sewing machine—was not metaphoric but
real. Instead of the sublime vertical trajectory of the spires, this needle had a
very practical function, whose purpose in the words of a contemporary journal-
ist was to liberate the tired fingers of the hardworking seamstress and bring to
an end the “sad song of the needle.”2

238
28 Nevsky Prospect 239

House of Singer

The House of Singer at 28 Nevsky Prospect, headquarters of the Singer Manu-

facturing Company in Russia, was located on prime real estate across from the
majestic neoclassical Kazan Cathedral. The two buildings, including their cu-
polas, offered a striking juxtaposition of neoclassical and modern architecture,
but some considered the proximity of the Singer building to the cathedral un-
seemly. Its eclectic and art nouveau architecture became the source of contro-
versy among the city’s preservationists, even though Nicholas II approved the
project on May 16, 1902. The well-known architect Pavel Syuzor designed the
House of Singer, using plate glass extensively, especially in the cupola, globe,
and internal atriums. Built between 1902 and 1904, after the demolition of the
eighteenth-century house that stood on the site, it became the country’s first
modern office building. As the city’s main architectural emblem of modernity
at the beginning of the twentieth century, it had steel girders, completely fire-
proof floors and ceilings, two interior downspouts, and a unique heating system
that kept the roof gutters clear of ice and snow during the winter—all new fea-
tures in Petersburg construction.3
Singer purchased the real estate from its original owner for more than one
million rubles, and legend has it that the company intended to build the first
high-rise in Petersburg, approximately at the time when it was planning to build
its forty-story office tower in New York, which become New York’s tallest build-
ing. The company, however, was not familiar with Petersburg regulations lim-
iting the height of buildings (except churches) to 23.5 meters, the height of the
Winter Palace and residence of the tsar.4 The way the company was able to get
around the restrictions was by placing a 2.8-meter translucent cupola topped by
a large glass globe over the House of Singer’s seven stories (six plus mansard
floor), making it the tallest building on Nevsky Prospect, which it is still today.
“The huge house of Singer on Nevsky across from the Kazan Cathedral has
almost taken off its scaffolding,” wrote Sergey R. Mintslov in his diary on No-
vember 8, 1903. “It is made of iron and stone. The builders have overdone the
gold to let us know that they have money, but that’s fine. All in all, Petersburg is
smartening up. It’s time to exchange our gloomy boxes called houses for some-
thing more comfortable and beautiful!”5 The construction of the building—
lavish outside and inside—cost 1.5 million rubles. The House of Singer opened
its doors on December 12, 1904, with a special art exhibit which featured its
240       

machine embroideries, including the Russian empire’s national costumes.6

The exhibit was organized by the Red Cross as a charitable event the proceeds
of which would go to the sick and wounded soldiers in the Far East.
The purpose of the building was not only to house the Singer offices, show-
rooms, storage areas, and actual workspaces for seamstresses but also to lease
office space to high-end foreign and Russian banks and businesses in Peters-
burg. The 1913 address book Ves’ Peterburg (All Petersburg), the equivalent of
today’s phone book with both “white” and “yellow” pages and other important
information for the urban dweller, lists several American companies as having
offices in the building.7
The top floor, which was covered by a modern glass atrium, was the
location of Singer’s corporate headquarters in Russia, which managed the
company’s extensive Russian market.8 Although there are no known descrip-
tions of the city vista from the top floor like those we have from the famed
Ivanov Tower on Tavricheskaya, the large windows of the corporate offices
offered the company’s senior officials a majestic panoramic view of the city
below. In the words of Michel de Certeau, the panoramic view would have
given Singer’s high officials not only the “voluptuous pleasure” of “seeing the
whole, of looking down on” the city, but also a sense of the company’s panop-
tic conquest of the Russian market, a point reinforced by the women lifting the
globe into the Petersburg sky.9 A large sculpture of the American eagle by Ar-
temy Ober, located on the corner of the building at the intersection of Nevsky
and Catherine Canal, symbolized American economic power. The glass globe
over the glass cupola represented the multinational scope of the company,
whose largest foreign market at the beginning of the twentieth century was
Russia.10 The name of the company in large Cyrillic letters on the equatorial
strip that girdled the illuminated globe served as an emblem of the global reach
of the Singer sewing machine and the importance of foreign investment in the
Russian economy. One of the standard Singer advertisements featured the Co-
lossus of Rhodes rising high above the city below and pointing to the Singer
machine in the sky, its vertical trajectory symbolizing the company’s panoptic
commercial vision. Like the direction of the gaze of the women straining to lift
the globe over the House of Singer, the Colossus is looking up, as if to impart a
sublime meaning to the sewing machine, an expression of what we could call a
“commercial sublime.”11
As one of the city’s well-known landmarks, the House of Singer was repre-
sented not only on postcards, but also in paintings and literary texts. In contrast
to the panoramic view, as well as the symbolic sublime gaze upward, the view
of the city from the street is relational, or partial, not absolute; it is defined by
28 Nevsky Prospect 241

movement through the city on foot or transport, unlike the static perspective of
the birds-eye view. As Alyson Tapp shows, one of the ways at the beginning
of the century that the view at street level—typically framed and therefore
limited—was represented is through the window of a tram or another moving
vehicle. An example of such a perspective is Nikolay Otsup’s nostalgic poem
“Autumn” (“Osen’,” 1920), written after he emigrated, in which the poet remi-
nisces about an autumn tram ride down Nevsky and captures its sites through
the tram window. One of the framed images is of the House of Singer:

[Tell us, House of Singer with your globe

Transparent in the arms of women
Above the glass and iron of the roof,
Do you love late autumn?]

Tellingly, the persona’s gaze is directed not at the building at street level but up
toward the globe embraced by the women, as seen from below from a moving
vehicle. The same is true of Nikolay Zabolotsky’s representation of the
“winged” globe straining to lift the name of Singer into the sky, which the poet
views from the vantage point of an automobile:

[There Nevsky shines and is melancholy

[. . . ]
As if embraced by frenzy,
Through fog, melancholy, and benzene,
The winged globe straining above the tower
Lifted up the name of “Singer.”]

Like Otsup’s, Zabolotsky’s image in “Evening Bar,” written in 1926 when the
Singer name was no longer on the globe, is retrospective and nostalgic: the
building had been renamed House of Books (Dom knigi) in 1919.14 And like
Otsup’s, his gaze inscribes a trajectory of looking up to that which is no more.
242       

History and memory aside, the two ways of viewing the city—bird’s-eye
view and street level—discussed by de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, of
which he gives clear preference to the street level, suggest the relationship of
part and whole, one of the key interests of modernism. If we consider the ges-
ture associated with the needle, seamstress, and sewing machine, it can be said
to bring parts together with the purpose of constructing a new whole, a gesture
that is aligned in opposition to fragmenting modernity, which in the case of
Petersburg’s revolutionary modernity symbolizes a break with the past. But be-
fore considering the narrative implications of sewing in literary and visual texts,
let us look at the narrative strategies of Singer’s advertisement campaign that
successfully introduced the first mass-marketed modern material objects into
Russian domestic space.

S inger’s M a rket ing St ra t eg i es

The Singer sewing machine entered the everyday life of Russian women with a
bang at the beginning of the twentieth century. It became a woman’s machine
associated with waged and unwaged female labor. A large part of Singer’s suc-
cess was the introduction of credit, or purchase on the installment plan, which
made its sewing machines (the cheapest cost 25 rubles) accessible to many Rus-
sian households, urban and even rural.15 Advertisements, such as the one pro-
moting the sewing machine in the Russian village whose caption reads: “the
most valuable dowry of a village bride is a sewing machine made by Singer,”
reflected the machine’s penetration into the Russian village. The only object of
modernity in the ad is the Singer, a gift from the bride’s father, suggesting that
modernity can coexist seamlessly with the traditional life of a village household,
that the new will build on the old.
The martial, bronze female figures that decorated the facade of the House
of Singer and that held spindles with a metal thread reaching from them down
to the Singer sewing machine below represented progress, linking tradition and
modernity.16 The narrative of Singer’s advertisements typically incorporated
traditional cultural emblems as part of the company’s international marketing
strategies of introducing an unfamiliar modern object and making it familiar,
as in the example of the Colossus of Rhodes advertising the modern sewing
machine. Ads directed at specific national markets typically used familiar
national, or ethnic, images, which sometimes presented curiously conflicted
narratives of modernity. What could be more incongruous, for instance, than
introducing the figure of Don Quixote into a Spanish Singer ad?17 Yet Singer
28 Nevsky Prospect 243

Advertisement for the Singer sewing machine from Singer Family Calendar, 1916 (courtesy of the
Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland)

did precisely that, having the errant knight fight giant sewing machines instead
of windmills.
The company used mostly female images to appeal to the growing female
market. The Singer “S” Girl trademark inscribed local specificity to attract
women everywhere, framing the alien machine by something familiar and
placating their fears regarding a rapidly changing world. The classical Russian
S-Girl, the emblematic Singer advertisement in Russia whose trademark image
appeared in all Russian Singer ads, large and small, did precisely that. The
woman sitting at the sewing machine wears decorative, premodern Russian
dress, which does not lend itself to modernity and the industrial age. Yet the
colorful kitschy figure, suggesting the interplay of modernity and tradition, em-
phasizes the national identity of the seamstress with the purpose of appealing to
a wide range of Russian women: if an old-fashioned woman can use the new in-
vention, then so can any Russian woman. In the words of the Niva journalist,
the “full-bodied ‘beauty’” in national dress is a symbol of “Russia at the sewing
machine, confident of her coming economic prosperity.”18
But what can we say about the archly posed photograph by the famed Rus-
sian photographer Karl Bulla of a real woman wearing the upper-class anach-
ronistic costume and sitting at a Singer machine as a reification of the Russian
Russian Singer Girl (Ves’ Peterburg, 1913)
Photograph by Karl Bulla of a woman in Russian national costume at a Singer sewing machine,
date unknown (courtesy of the Central State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, St. Petersburg)
246       

S-Girl?19 The image seems quite ludicrous, perhaps because it is a photograph

and not the kind of self-conscious folksy kitsch that characterizes the trademark
figure. The costume, especially the beaded headdress (kokoshnik ) is heavy, re-
quiring the woman to hold her head erect. The effect, though most probably
unintentional, seems parodic, and one wonders if it ever was used as a market-
ing tool. If anything, this seamstress would be capable only of decorative needle-
work, as represented by the embroidered cloth she supposedly sews on the
machine using the Singer’s new embroidery attachment. Upper-class women
had worn such costumes to masquerade balls since the eighteenth century,
when premodern dress was historicized as a result of the introduction of West-
ern dress by Peter the Great.20 In other words, the narrative fusing modernity
and tradition was tricky: if misplaced, as in Bulla’s photograph, it could easily
end up mocking the working seamstress or the woman who sewed for her fam-
ily. While seamstresses and housewives probably liked nostalgic Russian kitsch,
their lives obviously were very far removed from women of the leisure classes
who attended costume balls. In the radical scheme of things, moreover, Bulla’s
seamstress, as well as the S-Girl, in no way referenced the nineteenth-century
seamstresses, whether hopelessly downtrodden or politically awakened by
Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’? ), nor is she related to
the female textile workers, who made up about half of the textile labor force in
the Russian capital at the turn of the twentieth century.21
Singer’s domestic marketing tools included calendars that promoted the
family and its dependence on the sewing machine, aligning the sewing machine
with traditional domestic values. A 1916 Russian calendar of this sort featured
a kitschy image of a middle-class family on the cover, in which the Singer, as in
the village ad, is the only modern object in a cozy room occupied by a picture-
perfect middle-class family: family happiness frames the sewing machine, lo-
cated in the center, even though it has no immediate function in the picture
and seems simply to be part of the decor. But that is precisely the point: the
Singer informs the narrative of bourgeois domesticity as leisurely and joyful, in
contrast to the traditional nineteenth-century images of female toil.22
In 1905 the popular journal Niva published a rhapsodic promotional article
on the benefits of the sewing machine, describing it variously as a “friend of the
house,” a piece of “cultured furniture,” a unique “artistic” tool, and a “techno-
logical miracle” in the service of the garment industry. The reader is told that
its needle will pierce not only cloth but also cardboard, leather, wood, and even
lead. Beside advertising its power to conserve human energy and facilitate
productivity, the anonymous journalist distinguishes between the sewing
machine’s “prosaic” (practical) and “poetic” (artistic) functions. “The painterly
Cover of Singer Family Calendar, 1916 (courtesy of the Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland)
248       

power of the needle,” a reference to the Singer machine’s ability to embroider,

accomplishes the latter. As evidence, the author cites the opening exhibit in
the House of Singer that displayed and sold embroidered costumes and copies
of famous paintings from the Dresden Gallery, Louvre, and Hermitage. Visi-
tors could not believe, he claims, that the paintings were embroidered, not
painted—moreover by a sewing machine (!). The journalist caps the rhapsodic
description of the Singer by adding a musical note: instead of the sad song of
the needle, with which the article begins, he refers to the ubiquitous joyful song
of whirring sewing machines that suggest a pastoral idyll, not a scene of labor-
ing seamstresses. The journalist’s enthusiasm can be said to reify the etymology
of rhapsody, which comes from the Greek rhaptein and oide, combining the verb to
stitch and the noun song. And in regard to Singer’s conquest of the world, the
suggestion of the Niva article is that the sewing machine is a kind of technologi-
cal Gesamtkunstwerk, which can do virtually anything.
The Singer marketing campaign was premised on the idea of the sewing
machine as a multipurpose object that makes sewing pleasurable. Often the ads
framed it as an object of beauty that decorates interior spaces or as an instru-
ment for producing objects of aesthetic beauty, distancing the machine from
the industrial sweatshop that labor reformers struggled against and from the
kind of backbreaking domesticity depicted in socially conscious nineteenth-
century literature.23

T h e Ninet e ent h-C ent ur y S ea m s t r es s

a s Lit era r y Ima ge

According to an old Russian saying, the village survives by the needle and
harrow (igloi da boronoi derevnia stoit ), making the woman who sews the female
bulwark of village life. Sewing became the emblematic lower-class female pro-
fession in nineteenth-century literature, whose practitioner was the object of
economic and sexual exploitation. The toiling seamstress was the subject of
Thomas Hood’s progressive poem “The Song of the Shirt” (1843), which be-
came very popular in Russia after its translation by the radical journalist and
poet Mikhail Mikhaylov was published in The Contemporary (Sovremennik) in 1860.
The poem represented the never-ending work of the seamstress, who in the
words of Hood sings the song of the shirt while “plying her needle and thread.”24
The nineteenth-century literary seamstress was typically represented as a
fallen woman whose life ends badly. Dostoevsky described such a seamstress
cum fallen woman in his first novel, Poor Folk (Bednye liudi ). At the beginning of
28 Nevsky Prospect 249

the twentieth century, the conflation was parodied by Bely in Petersburg when
the double agent Morkovin spins the tall tale that he is the illegitimate son of
Apollon Apollonovich, the novel’s high-ranking bureaucrat, and a seamstress.
But already in the 1860s, the iconic radical novelist Chernyshevsky famously
revised her image in What Is to Be Done?, a text that influenced the Russian intel-
ligentsia for many decades thereafter: its feminist heroine, Vera Pavlovna, or-
ganizes a female sewing cooperative in which each seamstress assumes agency
by taking personal control of her economic and private life and so revises the
image of the profession. The sewing cooperative serves as the site of the re-
demption of Russian literature’s emblematic fallen woman, Nastya Kryukova,
who abandons prostitution to become a seamstress. It is based on socialist
principles—all seamstresses share equally in the profit—and respect for female
labor. Because of the collective’s successful operation, Vera Pavlovna creates a
network of dressmaking shops all over Petersburg, linking the city—and its
map—to the novel’s plot of female emancipation. The name of the upscale
shop on Nevsky Prospect is Au Bon Travail, Magasin des Nouveautés (the first
part is a reference to socialist principles of labor; the second is the name of the
forerunner of the Parisian department store).25 Sewing becomes an emblematic
activity, one that is conspiratorially linked to the novel’s revolutionary subtext,
with Vera Pavlovna becoming the agent of a revolutionary feminist narrative.26
According to Fred Carstensen, sewing machines were most likely first seen
in Russia somewhere between 1859 and 1861, which explains why there are no
references to them in What Is to Be Done? (1863), whose seamstresses still sew by
hand. By 1867 Petersburg newspapers were advertising the sewing machine and
Singer’s retail store on Nevsky Prospect.27 As a symbol of modernity and female
emancipation among radical Russian youth of the second half of the nineteenth
century, the sewing machine, which Karl Marx called “the decisively revolu-
tionary machine,”28 became affiliated with the emergence of the new woman.
Although intended ironically by Ivan Turgenev in the novel Smoke (Dym, 1867),
a radical feminist proclaims that “all women should acquire sewing machines
and establish collectives; this way they will earn their own bread and become in-
dependent,”29 reflecting on the symbolic capital of the sewing machine and its
presence in Russian material culture of the second half of the 1860s.

The Se a mst ress a nd N a r r a t i ve

Text and textile are etymologically linked; they come from the Latin verb texere,
meaning “to weave.” The traditional female activities of weaving, spinning,
250       

and sewing are the source of figurative language that describes the production
of narrative. Barbara Clayton writes that Greek “poets saw themselves as
‘weavers’ of words, ‘sewing’ them together.”30 Thread imagery entered the
metaphoric language referencing storytelling and narrative very long ago: collo-
cations such as “thread of the story,” “red thread,” “broken thread,” and “loose
thread” have become familiar metaphors of making and unmaking stories. Per-
haps the original affiliation of weaving and storytelling comes from Homer’s
Odyssey, in which Penelope, the weaver of the poem’s narrative, weaves, un-
ravels, and reweaves a shroud for her husband’s father as she faithfully awaits
Odysseus’s return. Her weaving can be said to contain spatially Homer’s
peripetic and peripatetic narrative—terms that I discuss in the introduction—
and thus forms the Odyssey’s chronotope as it frames the tale of her husband’s
travels. The association of time and female agency goes back to the Greek
Moirae and Roman Parcae, the goddesses of fate, who spin destiny’s peripeties
of each individual. They are present at birth, marking the beginning of the
thread of life, which they spin and then cut at life’s end: the first Fate spins the
thread, the second one measures it, and the third one cuts.
In Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines, J. Hillis Miller asks an unexpected and pro-
vocative question regarding the erotic and bodily origin of narrative and its
association with sewing: whether “the womb [is] a typewriter or a sewing ma-
chine.”31 Miller describes Ariadne’s thread, the one she gives to the mythical
hero Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth—an instance of fateful peri-
pety and peripatetic movement—as a “line that traces out the corridors of a
labyrinth that is already a kind of writing.”32 Narrative thread implies narrative
linearity, but when lost or broken it suggests either the infelicity of the story-
teller or a narrative defined by multiple threads, or strands, that form a laby-
rinth; and in the case of modernist writing, it can indicate the unraveling of tra-
ditional narrative texture and textuality. Most recently, thread has become a
hypertext term that characterizes the structure of the Web, reinforcing its affil-
iation with weaving. Susan Lang, for example, describes the Web as consisting
of “components usually called ‘threads’ or lines which intersect with each
other” to form hypertext narratives, which is precisely what the Web site ac-
companying this volume attempts to do.33
Discussing the production of narrative, de Certeau distinguishes between
instruments, or tools, that cut, tear, and remove and those that assemble, sew
together, and articulate.34 The work of the seamstress, who sews either by hand
or with the aid of a sewing machine, is directly related to joining disconnected
parts. She stitches together pieces of cloth with the purpose of fabricating a
meaningful whole. Although the activity of the seamstress in literature and
28 Nevsky Prospect 251

everyday culture is gendered, and consequently menial, it underlies both se-

quential narrative as well as one defined by its interruption and the tangling of
plot. Like Penelope and Ariadne, the seamstress performs her task in time
while putting together parts that are patently spatial, suggesting a chronotope
of sorts. The work of the modern seamstress at the sewing machine is related to
modernity’s acceleration of time, as we saw in the Singer advertisements. If we
assign her a symbolic role, she performs as either the silent or whirring motor of
the plot.
Threaded sewing needles, whether in a simple needle or in a sewing ma-
chine, bring together the disparate parts in a new way, creating a new whole,
different from the original pieces of fabric. They fabricate a text, so to speak.
This is precisely what Marcel Proust suggests in Time Regained, the last volume
of In Search of Lost Time: the narrator, as he thinks about time, compares writing
to dressmaking:

for at every moment the metaphor uppermost in my mind changed as I began

to represent to myself more clearly and in a more material shape the task upon
which I was about to embark—I thought that at my big deal table, under the
eyes of Françoise, who like all unpretentious people who live at close quarters
with us would have a certain insight into the nature of my labours [. . .] I should
work beside her and in a way almost as she worked herself [. . .] pinning here
and there an extra page, I should construct my book, I dare not say ambitiously
like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress.35

Instead of Proust’s better-known metaphor of the cathedral-novel36—a narra-

tive constructed like a cathedral—in Time Regained he tries on a dress-novel for
size, one that is symbolically sewn together from swatches of cloth, and asso-
ciates it with what women have always done in their everyday lives. The image
implies that as novelist-dressmaker he is constructing a more modest narrative
than the one he has described as a cathedral, yet he is suggesting that the for-
mer is just as laborious, intricate, and beautiful as the more masculine and
sublime cathedral.
A few pages earlier, the same narrator describes life as perpetually weaving
“fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that
these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the
web” of narrative;37 he also offers the metaphor “mysterious threads” that life
breaks. Bely’s Petersburg, a labyrinthine novel, frequently refers to the metaphor
of the narrative thread, which has its origin in the ball of thread that Ariadne
gave to Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth. In Petersburg, it functions as
a novelistic reference to self-reflexivity and to reading, but instead of finding
252       

the narrative thread, the reader is expected to lose it, of which the narrator
gives fair warning early on by telling us: “I have to break my narrative
thread;”38 or at the end of chapter 1: “the author, having hung his pictures of il-
lusions, should take them down quickly, breaking the narrative thread if only
with this sentence,” but the narrator tells the reader, playfully, that the author
will not provide such a sentence because he has every right to break the thread
of his story.39 Using the metaphor of weaving a few sentences later, the narra-
tor claims that the person of Apollon Apollonovich had been woven from the
narrator’s brain (sotkan iz nashego mozga); “The Thread of His Being Once Again
Has Been Found,” the title of the opening subchapter of chapter 6, meta-
phorizes the image as a mental function, referring to the terrorist Dudkin’s
efforts to find Ariadne’s thread, so to speak, to his private labyrinth, so that he
can collect himself after a fitful night of hallucinatory visions.
The references to narrative thread in Petersburg serve as commentary on the
novel’s fragmentary structure and imagery literally reinforced by the verb to
tear; the novel abounds in bodies, hearts, souls, mouths, consciousness, lives,
time, emotions, sensations, walls, clothing, clouds that are described as torn.
The underlying cause of this rending is of course the ticking bomb, the frag-
menting instrument of the novel’s plot and imagery that reflects Petersburg ’s
historical context of terrorist bomb throwing, war, and revolution.
The novelistic bomb and its rending power defines the altercation between
Nikolay Ableukhov and his former friend Sergey Likhutin in one of the less-
studied peripeties of the novel, in which the latter literally rips the frockcoat of
the former and produces a realized metaphor. Although Nikolay assumes, and
the reader with him, that the action is motivated by his inappropriate pursuit of
Sergey’s wife, Sofia Petrovna, the husband tells him that it is the bomb with
which Nikolay is supposed to kill his father. Tellingly, Sergey’s gesture of rip-
ping the coat is preceded by his having “interrupted [literally, ‘torn off ’ ] the
narrative.” The interruption is compared to typesetting that has been acciden-
tally disassembled, reassembled, and read—a reference to the letter in which
Nikolay is ordered to blow up his father and which Sergey surreptitiously read
(Sofia Petrovna was supposed to deliver the letter to Nikolay). So writing, read-
ing, and sewing are self-consciously linked in the images of the narrative tear
and the tear of the coat: Sergey repeatedly offers to stitch the coat, and the ap-
pearance of an actual needle and thread in the scene mark his efforts to make
things right again. In a larger sense, the torn narrative and the torn coat refer
to the breakdown of the Ableukhov and Likhutin families, and the sewing
needle symbolizes a fantasy of restoration that Nikolay, however, rejects, as he
limps away with his torn coat trailing behind him.
28 Nevsky Prospect 253

What I am suggesting here is that beside the reigning metaphor of the

bomb that produces narrative shards and distorted images,40 Bely also insinu-
ates the metaphor of stitching, that is, of making things whole again. If we con-
sider the bomb in relation to the modernist obsession with the relationship of
parts and whole, it functions as the source of novelistic fragmentation, whereas
stitching brings parts together with the purpose of constructing a new whole, a
gesture that is aligned with the traditional role of the seamstress, in opposition
to fragmenting modernity. And if the bomb can be said to be successful in
deploying modernist fragmentation in the novel, the metaphor of stitching
lacks the power of recuperating the whole: here, in the case of Nikolay and the
Likhutins, of resolving the tension of their romantic triangle—or stopping the
bomb explosion in the first place. The failure of sewing as agency is already re-
flected in the activities of the episodic dressmakers and tailors in the novel, who
make costumes and masks that contribute to Petersburg’s narrative of deception,
conspiracy, and death.41
Bely’s older contemporary and mentor who very likely used the thread
metaphor more than the other symbolists was the poet Zinaida Gippius. Co-
incidentally, she was also mistress of the needle: “something which had per-
haps once been a pink silk petticoat kept her busy for hours,” writes Temira
Pachmuss, describing the fine needlework of her last years. “She cut little holes
out of it, which she then patched carefully with some material that she had
found somewhere else. It was not possible to say what had originally belonged
there and what was newly sewn.”42 If considered in relation to the act of writ-
ing, the description suggests the creation of a new text from an old one. In a
letter to Zinaida Vengerova in 1897, Gippius transforms texts into a meta-
phoric textile, imagining a dress made from their correspondence: “Your let-
ter is lying on top of mine. Its gray color combines with my red so beautifully,
even though a bit stridently. I will make myself such a double symbolic
dress.”43 The image reflects on an intimate relationship that the writer-
seamstress will, metaphorically speaking, sew and then wear. Gippius writes in
her intimate diary around the same time that she could only write letters to
those with whom she feels a corporeal bond, calling it a “corporeal thread”
(telesnaia nit’ ).44 She frequently describes human ties in her poetry and private
letters as threads that must be torn or as new ones that will bind people in new
spiritual ways.45 Her poetry abounds in threads of spider webs, rain, whirl-
wind, sun, electricity, wings, temple curtain, life, time, threads that form knots
and tangled knots—images that often take on metaphysical meaning. The
poem “Electricity,” for instance, describes the positive and negative electrical
currents as threads that when woven together will produce light, which the
254       

poet associates with resurrection, that is, with the transcendence of a life di-
vided by strife and absence of community. Like in so many of her poems that
inscribe metaphoric threads, “Electricity” addresses the creation of a new com-
munity that is premised on her symbolist project of transcending the material
world by means of divine logos.46
What is striking about Gippius’s use of the female domain of weaving and
sewing is that she wrote poetry in a male voice.47 In this regard “The Seam-
stress” (“Shveia”), which demonstrates the relationship between the everyday
activity of sewing—its solitary backbreaking work—and its symbolic meaning,
is unusual because of its patently female voice:48

[Already the third day I don’t speak with anyone . . .

But my thoughts are greedy and mean.
My back hurts; wherever I look—
Are light blue spots.

The church bell droned, it stopped;

I am still alone with myself.
The hot scarlet silk rustles and bends
Under the clumsy needle.
28 Nevsky Prospect 255

On all phenomena there rests a seal.

As if one has merged with the other.
Accepting one—I try to guess
The other, the one that is hidden.

And this silk seems like Fire to me.

And already not fire—but Blood.
And blood is only a sign of that which
In our poor language—we call Love.

Love is but a sound . . . But at this late hour

I won’t reveal that which comes later.
No, not fire, not blood . . . but merely satin
Rustles under the timid needle.]

The act of sewing and the rustling sound of red silk under the needle of the
seamstress are transformed first into fire, then blood that the poet-seamstress
associates with love, which in turn has the potential of divine union and escape
from the everyday.50 But the poet refuses to disclose what has been revealed to
her; the poetic correspondence of the activity of the seamstress and epiphany
achieved by means of language, despite its limitations (nash bednyi iazyk), lasts
only for a moment and is quickly dispersed: the seamstress is unable to break
out of this world and the activity of sewing returns to its everyday meaning, and
like in Bely’s novel, does not produce order or resolution.
Some of the Russian terms for writing poetry have stitching as a subtext.
The noun stroka, meaning “line of verse,” is etymologically related to the verb
strochit’ (stitch), but it also means “line of stitches.” Marina Tsvetaeva uses the
double meaning of stroka, calling herself a day seamstress of lines (Strok podennaia
shveia) and fusing the figures of poet and seamstress.51 The diminutive strochka,
which means “stitch” as well as “line of stitches,” is the more common word for
“line of verse,” but the verb strochit’, whose primary meaning is “to stitch,” also
has the metaphoric meaning of “scribbling” in Russian, or writing in an ironic
sense: Apollon Apollonovich in the epilogue of Petersburg strochit memuary (writes
memoirs); the expression strochit’ stikhi is a reference to writing verse routinely
or without much skill: Gippius’s Kak my voinam pisali i chto oni nam otvechali (How
We Wrote to the Soldiers and What They Answered Us), a volume of invented corre-
spondence, in verse and prose, between uneducated men at the front during
the First World War and semi-educated women back home, may be seen as a
self-conscious instance of strochit’ stikhi.52
The volume references the patriotic narrative of women sewing for sol-
diers, an important public occupation of socially conscious women during the
256       

Russo-Japanese War and the First World War that enacted women’s tradi-
tional role. (The former serves as the political background of Petersburg.) Photo-
graphs of upper-class women sitting at sewing machines, making clothing,
supplies, and bandages for Russian soldiers at the front, appeared frequently in
the press, for example, in the high-end journal Stolitsa i usad’ba whose offices
were located in the House of Singer. One of these collective sewing events dur-
ing the First World War took place there under the auspices of the empress. The
House of Singer was in fact contracted to produce military uniforms, despite
rumors that it was a site of German spying activity.53
In contrast to performing the genteel activity of needlework, the upper-
class woman sitting at a sewing machine participates, even if only emblemati-
cally, in the larger social collective by supporting the nation at war. As in the
volume Gippius published, these charitable gatherings foregrounded the tradi-
tional domestic and healing function of female agency and offered a striking
contrast to the violent narrative of war, which disperses and mutilates the body:
“while 22,000-kilo weapons sowed death and destruction everywhere, sending
death-dealing projectiles into the peaceful sky, thousands of Singer machines
with the help of their steel muscles help people sew military coats, underwear,
boots, tents, duffle bags, bandages,” writes the same Niva journalist who pro-
moted the wonders of the Singer sewing machine. “Whole trains of army and
hospital equipment [made by women] have been delivered and continue to be
delivered to the theater of war.”54 Referring to the Russo-Japanese War, the
women, like Penelopes, instead of sowing destruction, await the warriors’ safe
return home as they sew for the soldiers with the purpose of clothing them and
keeping them warm.

How to end this essay, in which I have attempted to weave into a single text
the different historical strands and swatches of stories of seamstresses and the
Singer sewing machine? Since ancient times, the chronotope of real and meta-
phoric weaving, spinning, and sewing has linked the female domain to the cre-
ation of narrative and still informs the way we speak about it. Penelope weaves
the shroud not only with the purpose of constructing but also of unraveling it,
performing the kind of double gesture that informs modernist writing. Despite
the modernism of Bely’s Petersburg, or of Gippius’s failure as seamstress of trans-
cendence, I have taken pains not to break the thread of my narrative without,
however, aiming at the construction of a clearly articulated line of argument.
Instead, quite self-consciously mimicking weaving and dressmaking, I have tried
to tell the story of the needle and of modernity by producing a text that speaks for
itself, one that creates meaning through juxtaposition and accretion—a text
28 Nevsky Prospect 257

that demonstrates the origins of narrative in material culture, the female do-
main, and the everyday.
Circling back to the beginning of this essay—to the House of Singer on
Nevsky Prospect and its fate after the revolution, it seems uncanny that it be-
came the biggest bookstore in Petrograd and then Leningrad, and that in 1919,
the House of Singer was renamed House of Books (Dom Knigi) and also be-
came the location of the city’s state publishing headquarters.55 Although a ser-
endipitous occurrence, the renaming evokes the symbolic affiliation of sewing
and writing, yet this symbolic affiliation was put in question at the beginning
of the twenty-first century—after the fall of the Soviet Union. Just as the House
of Singer, the bookstore was subjected to the peripeties of renaming and peri-
patetic relocation, so that the building, which was in great disrepair, could be
restored to its prerevolutionary condition and name. Doubtful of the return of
the bookstore to the luxuriously refurbished House of Singer, which indeed has
been restored to its original appearance both outside and inside, the citizens of
post-Soviet St. Petersburg expressed their rightful concerns widely and loudly.
After an extensive and fierce press campaign, the House of Books did return to
the building in 2006, to restore not only the symbolic link of sewing and writing
but also the location of the largest bookstore in the city.


1. There used to be two sculptural ensembles of three women bearing a globe lo-
cated on both sides of the riverside entrance of the Admiralty, which may have served as
the prototype of the globe on the House of Singer.
2. “O znachenii shveinoi mashiny v domashnem obikhode i promyshlennosti,”
Niva 36 (1905): 706.
3. Fred V. Carstensen, American Enterprise in Foreign Markets: Studies of Singer and Inter-
national Harvester in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1984), 49.
4. “Dom kompanii Zinger v S-Peterburge,” Zodchii 39 (September 24, 1906): 391.
See also M. S. Burenina, Progulki po Nevskomu prospektu (St. Petersburg: Litera, 2002), 77–
78. The ruling was originally issued by Nicholas I in 1844. Burenina writes that in Octo-
ber 1917 the Bolsheviks held a meeting at the House of Singer to plan armed insurrection.
5. S. R. Mintslov, Peterburg v 1903–1910 godakh (Riga, 1931), 105. Mintslov was an au-
thor, book collector, and owner of one of Petersburg’s private lending libraries.
6. Carstensen, American Enterprise, 49.
7. Ves’ Peterburg (1913) lists the Society of the United Steel Companies of America,
Crucible Steel Company of America, the shippers Gerhard and Hey, as well as the Amer-
ican Consulate in St. Petersburg. The Russian-English Bank, St. Petersburg Commer-
cial Bank, which occupied parts of the first two floors, Bank of Zakhary Zhdanov, and
The Brothers Dzhamgarov Bank were located in House of Singer at various times. The
258       

1913 issue of Ves’ Peterburg also listed the following: Finnish Bureau of I. I. Stremts, a
finance company; Felzer and Co. Machine Factory (Association of Riga); Commercial
House of B. B. Von Rören and Company, a patent company; the Russian Book Associ-
ation Kul’tura; and the Gold Mining Society of S. F. Ovsyannikov and Company. The
building also housed offices of such smaller establishments as the Renaissance Associa-
tion, which specialized in rejuvenating beauty products. In 1916 the offices of All-
Russian Supply and Demand, a finance company, and of the General Society of Life
Insurance and Insurance of Life Earnings were in the House of Singer.
8. Advertisements in Petersburg newspapers in 1905 claimed that there were
twelve hundred Singer retail stores in Russia (Carstensen, American Enterprise, 50; “O
znachenii,” Niva, 708). In 1902 the company built a factory in Podolsk, twenty-six miles
south of Moscow, which began operation in 1902 and became the third largest producer
of Singer sewing machines in the world.
9. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 92.
10. In 1912 Singer was the seventh largest firm in the world (Andrew Godley, “Sell-
ing the Sewing Machine around the World: Singer’s International Marketing Strate-
gies, 1850–1920,” Enterprise and Society 7, no. 2 [2006]: 267). By 1914, 4 percent of the Rus-
sian population, equaling 15–20 percent of households, owned a sewing machine (278).
11. Another example is the Italian poster advertising the Singer, in which the con-
quest of Mount Everest is defined by the S-Girl at the sewing machine located at the
very top, toward which the mountain climber gestures ecstatically. For images of Singer
advertisements, including this one, see my Singer Sewing Machine itinerary on our
Web site, Mapping Petersburg. The itinerary explores the Singer sewing machine in Russia
from four perspectives: Singer Advertisements in Russia, Seamstress and Narrative,
Singer Sewing Machine Conquers Nature, and Architecture.
12. Nikolay Otsup, “Osen’,” in Tsekh poetov, vol. 1 (Berlin: Efron, 1923), 59
13. Nikolay Zabolotsky, “Vechernii bar,” in Izbrannoe, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudo-
zhestvennaia literatura, 1972), 38.
14. Singer’s Russian assets were confiscated by the Soviet state.
15. The introduction of credit was the subtext of the saying “run from Singer”
(begat’ ot Zingera), i.e., avoid installment payments to the Singer Company. Another mar-
keting strategy—at least in Petersburg—was the use of live advertisements in the show
windows of Singer shops, in which a seamstress would sit at a sewing machine and sew.
16. The Estonian sculptor Amandus G. Adamson designed the six bronze,
Valkyrie-like female figures (three of which have the sewing machines), as well as the
women holding up the globe on the House of Singer.
17. See the Don Quixote ad on the Singer Sewing Machine itinerary: “Singer Sew-
ing Machine Conquers Nature.”
18. “O znachenii,” Niva, 708.
19. Bulla’s 1912 photograph of the House of Singer became the building’s classical
photographic representation.
20. The glossy upper-class journal Stolitsa i usadba, whose offices were located in the
House of Singer, featured photographs of such lavish balls.
21. In 1896–97, the textile workers’ strikes in the capital played an important role in
forcing the government to reduce the length of the workday to eleven and a half hours
28 Nevsky Prospect 259

and make Sundays an obligatory holiday (Allan K. Widman, The Making of a Workers’
Revolution: Russian Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 [Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963], 23–24, 73–78).
22. The same 1916 calendar also contained an article on the recent exploration of
Antarctica, with photos of men sewing tents and other equipment using the Singer.
Here sewing is gendered as male: exploration of distant lands was the purview of men.
You can see these images on the Web site in the Singer Sewing Machine itinerary.
23. Among the most striking examples of turning the sewing machine into an aes-
thetic object is an ad by the New Home Sewing Machine Company in which a young
woman dressed in evening finery sees a freestanding sewing machine in the mirror in-
stead of herself !
24. According to J. C. Reid, the Russian version of the poem apparently inspired
Mussorgsky’s scherzino “The Seamstress” (“Shveia,” 1871) ( J. C. Reid, Thomas Hood
[ London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963]), 263). What Is to Be Done? ends with Hood’s
poem “Stanzas,” which celebrates revolutionary change.
25. The name of the shop suggests the fusion of socialist principles and bourgeois
consumerism, which previous students of Chernyshevsky seem not to have noted, pay-
ing attention only to the shop’s socialist reference. See, e.g., Chto delat’, ed. S. A. Reyser
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 855 n150.
26. The publication of What Is to Be Done? produced radical propaganda among
seamstresses working in dressmaking establishments and led to attempts to organize
sewing cooperatives. See e.g., Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia:
Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991), 111, 118, 120.
27. Carstensen, American Enterprise, 27–28.
28. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels,
trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1921), 516.
29. I. S. Turgenev, Dym (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961), 19.
30. Barbara Clayton, A Penelopean Poetics: Reweaving the Feminine in Homer’s Poetics
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 25. Clayton offers a compelling rereading of
the Odyssey through the figure of Penelope, arguing that she is the primary weaver of
narrative.
31. Joseph Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1982), 7.
32. Ibid., 10.
33. Susan Lang, “Converging (or Colliding) Traditions: Integrating Hypertext into
Literary Studies,” in Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation, ed.
Philip G. Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1997), 295.
34. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 147.
35. Marcel Proust, Time Regained in In Search of Lost Time, trans. Andreas Mayor,
Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright, vol. 6 (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 508–9.
36. In a letter to his friend Jean de Gaigneron, Proust writes about his architectural
conception of Remembrance of Things Past as a cathedral (Diane R. Leonard, “Ruskin and
the Cathedral of Lost Souls,” in The Cambridge Companion to Proust, ed. Richard Bates
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2001], 52–53).
37. Proust, Time Regained, 504.
260       

38. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 19.
39. Ibid., 56
40. On the imagery produced by the bomb and Bely’s description of himself as a
bomb, see part 1 of this volume, p. 39.
41. See Cameron Wiggins’s discussion in this volume of the masked ball in Petersburg.
42. Temira Pachmuss, Zinaida Hippius: An Intellectual Profile (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1971), 399.
43. Zinaida Gippius to Zinaida Vengerova, April 8, 1897, f. 39, op. 2, ed. khr. 542,
Institute of Russian Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg.
44. Zinaida Gippius, Contes d’Amour, in Dnevniki, ed. A.N. Nikolyukin (Moscow:
NPK “Intelvak,” 1999), 1:53.
45. See, e.g., Zinaida Gippius to Ekaterina Diaghileva, August 11, 1905, f. 102, ed.
khr. 118, Institute of Russian Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg.
46. For a discussion of Gippius’s religious consciousness, see Olga Matich, Erotic
Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2005), 162–211.
47. The affiliation of women poets with the female activity of sewing, weaving, and
embroidering was frequently used to deprecate their poetry. A striking instance of such
condescension was Nikolay Gumilev’s comment regarding the invitation to his wife,
Anna Akhmatova, to read her poetry at Vyacheslav Ivanov and Lidiya Zinovieve-
Annibal’s Tower. Gumilev was supposed to have said that besides writing poetry, his
“wife also embroiders splendidly” (Georgy Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh [Mos-
cow: Soglasie, 1994], 3:56).
48. Vladislav Khodasevich wrote a poem titled “Seamstress” (“Shveia”) in 1917,
using a female voice, as would Fyodor Sologub (“Shveia,” 1923).
49. Zinaida Gippius, “Shveia,” in Stikhotvoreniia, Novaia biblioteka poeta, ed. A.V.
Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe Izd. Akademicheskii proekt, 1999), 119–20. The
translation that follows is mine.
50. Marina Tsvetaeva in the 1924 “Poem of the End” (“Poema kontsa”), which is
about the end of a passionate erotic relationship, describes love as a seam (shov), and its
violent end as the ripping of the seam that creates scars. The Russian for scar is rubets, a
word that also means “seam.”
51. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Dnei spolzaiushchie slizni” (“Crawling Slugs of Days”),
Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh, ed. A. Sumerkin, vol. 3 (New York: Russica, 1983), 134.
52. The metaphor of stitching verse is reinforced by the women sending the sol-
diers clothing and tobacco pouches that they make. Even though Gippius is listed as the
compiler of the collection, she in fact authored the poems and letters herself, writing
them in a patently substandard Russian. Signaling the playful hoax, the Petrograd street
addresses of the women are either on Sergievskaya Street, where Gippius lived at the
time, or in the immediate vicinity. Whether the volume, which to my knowledge has not
been studied, was an inventive patriotic action proselytizing the practice of writing to
the soldiers at the front, or one of making money remains unclear, although my assump-
tion is that it was the latter. The print run of the volume, called a gift book (kniga-podarok),
was twelve hundred copies, which—interestingly—was more than any of her other
books.
28 Nevsky Prospect 261

53. The Singer Company in Russia was accused of serving as a front for German
spies during the First World War as part of the official policy of investigating foreign
citizens and especially their commercial enterprises, apparently with the purpose of ex-
propriation. The Singer case was apparently the largest and most contentious instance
of such activity. According to Eric Lohr, the charges had no basis. Contrary to popular
belief, the company was American, not German, and most of its employees were ethnic
Russians (Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens
during World War I [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003], 79–82).
54. “O znachenii,” Niva, 707.
55. The government publisher Lenizdat, the publisher Academia, and the editorial
offices of the journals Kniga i revoliutsiia, Leningrad, Zvezda, and Literaturnaia ucheba occupied
the top floors of the building during the 1920s and 1930s.
 10
Meat in Russia’s
Modernist Imagination
       

There is no visible trace today of the old slaughterhouse at the edge of

Petersburg’s Enclosure Canal (Obvodny Canal), and modern-day pedestrians
strolling along Moskovsky Prospect would little suspect that the sidewalks
under their feet were once cow paths leading to the slaughterhouse that were
paved over in the 1930s.1 Yet, in the very early years of the century, the ugly
underbelly of Petersburg’s meat industry was laid bare for inquisitive tourists of
urban space, though they would have to venture to what were then the margins
of the city to experience it. In the City Public Administration’s official 1903
Travel Guide of St. Petersburg (Putevoditel’ po S.-Peterburgu), the city’s stockyard and
its surroundings merited mention alongside the more conventional and cele-
brated sights of the imperial capital. In one suggested excursion, for example,
the tourist was directed to the Meat Museum, which had been built on the
premises of the stockyard in 1890 and where information on new hygienic tech-
niques in animal slaughter and rendering could be perused.2 The stockyards
seemed to hold a fascination as well for Russian artists of the early twentieth
century, who were modernist flâneurs of their own sort: writer Isaac Babel, for
one, roamed about the city slaughterhouse in 1918 to report on the booming
horsemeat industry during the lean years of Russia’s Civil War.3 Slaughter in
Russia’s belle époque was a public spectacle; for the Petersburg administration,

262
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 263

which was proud of its enlightened governance, an excursion through the

municipal stockyard was, specifically, a spectacle of progress. In time, however,
the modernist and revolutionary imaginations would seize on the excesses and
failures of science, industry, and government, and meat would become the stuff
of revolution.
To begin this discussion of meat in the modernist imagination, we will first
consider how the production of meat allegorizes the processing of workers in
Russia’s urban centers at the dawn of the twentieth century. Raw materials and
human labor were being drawn into Russia’s larger cities to feed new industries
and growing populations, and in the imagination of writers and artists in Russia
and the early Soviet Union, meat became a favored metaphor for the modern,
working body. Metaphors were the stock in trade of the aesthetic economy—to
be exchanged, consumed, processed, and repackaged. However, this metaphor
in the aesthetic economy of the day did not only reproduce the actual economy
of meat. The metaphor re-grew its flesh, as self-consciously demonstrated by
Russian filmmakers, cutting gelatin-emulsified film stock. As Dziga Vertov
might say, they put the skin back on the metaphor.
In this essay, I will consider the material history of meat and its aesthetic
digestion. I will discuss how the cow made its way to the dinner table in fin-de-
siècle Petersburg, how the worker’s body was incorporated into the economic
machinery of the city, and, eventually, how all of this raw organic material was
rendered by the creative processes of Russia’s writers and artists in the early
twentieth century.
Aside from its consummate material reality, which is one of the chief
interests of this volume, slaughter functions as an immensely powerful symbol
for the early decades of the twentieth century (1900–1930)—an age in which
workers’ bodies were being segmented and incorporated into social and eco-
nomic bodies: corporations in the burgeoning capitalism of the imperial age
and collectives in the Soviet age. Like other common objects and processes,
meat and slaughter figure in our linguistic and semiotic imagination and lard the
common stock of rhetorical devices, metaphors, and idioms that are the tokens
of our linguistic exchange. Meat has particular resonance in the Russian mod-
ernist imagination. The history of meat in the early decades of the twentieth
century in Russia—its production, consumption, and representation—has
something to tell us about Russia’s unique modernity: the mythopoesis of revo-
lution, the worker’s body in Russia’s industrialization, and modernist literary
and visual production.
264     

Butchers at work at Aux Gourmets, St. Petersburg, 1905 (courtesy of the Central State Archive of
Film and Photo Documents, St. Petersburg)

Ur ban Indust r y: Proc essing t he Bo dy

More than three-quarters of the beef cattle that made their way into Petersburg
around the turn of the century were shipped by rail to Nikolaevsky Station
(known as Moscow Station since 1924), which was located at the eastern end of
Petersburg’s celebrated Nevsky Prospect, far from the royal palaces that
hugged the banks of the Neva River on the western end of that boulevard.4 In
the early hours of the morning, a stream of cattle, newly arrived by rail, would
pour through Petersburg’s main thoroughfares to the margins of the city,
driven by herders carrying staves and crooks to the stockyard abutting the
slaughterhouse at the southern industrial belt of the Enclosure Canal.
A meat diet in Russia was historically associated with an elite lifestyle, non-
manual labor, and an abandonment of traditional religious values and rituals.
Vegetarian diets had long been the norm among the rural Russian peasantry,
and not for economic reasons alone: the pious among them, if they observed all
fasts, would keep to meat-free meals approximately 180 days out of the year.5
Anxiety concerning the availability, price, and politics of meat became an
urban bourgeois fixation. The 1912 trade book, The Meat Question (Miasnoi vopros),
warned of the growing unrest throughout Europe’s cities over the rising cost of
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 265

meat: “The capital and major cities are literally groaning under the weight
of the high prices of meat; they are searching, though unsuccessfully, for any
possible measure of lowering its price, but meat just gets more and more expen-
sive. The consumption of horsemeat in Petersburg and Moscow has signifi-
cantly increased. This is the best evidence of how the ‘meat crisis’ has already
stolen into Russia, so rich in cattle-raising.”6 The “crisis” was a luxury of the
upwardly mobile class, given the limits that factory wages set on regular meat
consumption at this time.
Just as Petersburg’s urbanites required meat, so did the economic machin-
ery of the city demand raw materials and, above all, labor.7 In the slaughter-
house itself, trade knowledge was passed down from older workers to new re-
cruits, who would work their way up through the ranks, taking on new tasks as
they gained experience and responsibility: the zavodnyi led the animal into its
stall, the storonshchik skinned the animal, the nutrenshchik cleaned the inside of
the carcass after slaughter, and the bashkol, the senior-most employee, was in
charge of wielding the lethal knife. To compensate him for the most fraught
work in the slaughterhouse and for taking society’s moral burden on himself,
the bashkol had the perk, in addition to his wages, of carrying home the ears and
nose of the bull to his family. (Elena Molokhovets, in her wildly popular cook-
book, Gift to Young Housewives [Podarok molodym khoziaikam], offers helpful sugges-
tions for using all parts of the animal; turning by-products into meat-jellies,
sausages, and other treats.8) Over the course of his working life, an employee of
the preindustrial slaughterhouse would have progressed through the hierarchy
and experienced each stage of the process of slaughter.
Once the animal had been slaughtered, the carcasses and the better cuts of
meat were distributed to the 1,020 meat shops in Petersburg to be sold on site
or at the many outdoor markets around the city. Butchers would cleave the
carcass into two equal parts down the middle then divide each side of beef into
twenty cuts, graded one through five for quality. As Anatoly Bakhtiarov notes
in The Belly of Petersburg (Briukho Peterburga), only “savages” eat meat fresh from
slaughter; rather, meat was set aside for a few days until the process of spoilage
had just begun, when it was considered at the height of flavor. Customers
would, finally, purchase meat at outdoor markets or place orders with their
local butcher, who would make deliveries to their home. From the field to the
dinner table, a single cow would have been handled by dozens of workers: from
farmers, herders, and brokers to inspectors, slaughtermen, and butchers.9
Although the teleology of meat points to the dinner table, the “afterlife” of
the cow continued on the industrial plane. A host of products, many of them
manufactured using age-old techniques, sprang from the body of the bull.
266     

Blood was an extremely useful by-product. The cattle slaughtered each year in
Petersburg yielded approximately 8 million pounds of blood,10 and most of this
was sent to Piper and Company, the blood processing plant adjacent to the
slaughterhouse.11 Albumin, a protein found in blood, was extracted for calico
dyes, and a certain amount of blood was sold to hospitals, where it was given as
a tonic for anemia. These anemic patients (mostly women and children) would
be given a cup of warm calf ’s blood to drink as part of their treatment. Although
the Eastern Orthodox Church forbade the consumption of blood (along with
other Levitical prohibitions against idols, fornication, and things strangled),
animal blood was nonetheless added to many consumer health tonics, such as
Gematogen (found in a candy-bar-like form in Russian pharmacies to this day).
The use of blood in these products was not advertised, offering some evidence
that the taboo against imbibing blood, even for medical purposes, was potent.
The hooves, horns, bones, skin, and other by-products of the animal were
transferred from the slaughterhouse to Albumin Street, a site of small industry
behind Nikolaevsky Station, where they would be sterilized, boiled, separated,
and otherwise processed. From here, they were distributed to craftsmen, arti-
sans, and factories across the city for further refining. This single animal—the
cow—sustained an astonishing number of industries and workers: leather, per-
fumes, tallow, creams, tonics, gelatin, glue, and paint additives were just a few
of the products that were produced from animal rendering. Bear in mind that
the premodern chemistry of consumer goods was based on raw organic sub-
stances such as these—mineral, vegetable, and, especially, animal matter. In the
end the industrial processing of the living, or once-living, body as raw material
was a synecdoche for the entire economic activity of the city: living bodies were
the very substance of the city’s industrial and economic life. But, now, to con-
nect the metabolism of the city with the modernist imagination, we must travel
from the margins of culture, the ugly underbelly of Petersburg’s meat industry,
to the center—the commonplaces of Russian culture in the early decades of the
twentieth century.

From Re a lism t o M ode r n i s m :

T h e Re ndering of t he Ar t i s t i c Wo r k

In art, blood is not bloody.

Viktor Shklovsky

Although modernism’s boundaries are contested, the artistic trend is most

often characterized by its reflection upon, and advancement of, assaults on
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 267

classical, unified narratives of self and society. Modernism’s tools are simulta-
neity, juxtaposition, fragmentation, and montage, each reflecting in art a facet
of the violent experience of modernity—not least, of working modernity. David
Bradshaw writes that “one figure for the destructive effects of both military and
industrial technology is the dismemberment and fragmentation of the human
body.” He identifies an environment in which this assault on the body takes
place: the slaughterhouse in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906)—“a war zone in
which both animals and humans are shredded.”12 The slaughterhouse was in-
deed an exemplary site of modern industrial exploitation, of fears concerning
the working body, and of capitalist materialism. All of this was perceived as
part of a larger and very modern assault on “whole” men.
In his history of the preindustrial slaughterhouse, Anatoly Bakhtiarov de-
scribes the very sale of cattle as a hallowed occasion that was conducted in rev-
erent whispers: “Despite there being hundreds of butchers and dealers, silence
reigns among them and you would think that some sort of holy event was tak-
ing place.”13 These skilled slaughtermen observed fasts in the strictest manner,
lived communally, slept in a single room, and ate from a common table, not
unlike a monkish order.14 In this nearly monastic environment, slaughter was a
sacred event whose rituals preserved the dignity of both animal and worker,
linking the process to a primal human rite.
Although roughly contemporaneous with Bakhtiarov’s account, Vladimir
Korolenko’s “Factory of Death” (“Fabrika smerti”) is set in a fully industrial-
ized slaughterhouse: Swift and Armour in Chicago. In this text, the desacral-
ization and industrialization of animal slaughter is troped as butchery of the
worker. “Factory of Death” was written in 1895—more than a decade before
the publication of Sinclair’s The Jungle, which had considerable influence in
Russia (it was translated into Russian the same year that it debuted in the
United States, 1906). Korolenko’s “hero of the stockyard” is a man reverting to
an animal state, robbed of higher consciousness by the demands of industrial
efficiency, physically and psychically resembling the animal whose body he is
employed to process:

Here are the principal heroes of the stockyard . . .

Not far from the hoist, nearly naked, slippery all over, white-bodied and in-
different, stands a man with a narrow knife in his hand. When the animal rolls
by him, he makes a habitual movement downward. A squeal, the death rattle, a
wave of crimson blood from the cut . . . and the pulley goes forward along the
track and another animal inexorably moves toward the half-naked man . . .
The entire work of the man consists in only this one downward motion of the
knife. From five to ten seconds for each life, six lives per minute, thirty-six per
hour, three hundred and sixty in ten hours, and in the slaughterhouse, they
268     

work from twelve to thirteen hours . . . Workers in the slaughterhouse are the
most undeveloped and stupid of all workers: they still don’t belong to unions
and they don’t know how to stand up for their interests. Around five hundred
murders per day, fifteen thousand per month—and it is in this that the entirety
of life consists for the half-naked man with the knife.15

The correlation between the number of hours in the workday and the number
of deaths in the slaughterhouse is more than one of simple cause and effect:
it metaphorizes the processing of the worker himself in the city’s economic
system and his complicity in cannibalistic digestion. As his critique shades into
the moral realm, Korolenko likens the act of slaughter to murder, for the effi-
ciency ratio in the Swift and Armour slaughterhouse is one “life” every five to
ten seconds. As if reverting to a state of savagery, the worker in the slaughter-
house is consistently described as “naked” or “half-naked” and judged to be the
“most undeveloped” and dullest of all workers. Korolenko’s critique is at once
moral, economic, and political: the Swift and Armour workers, engaged in
slaughtering animals, have themselves become bestial. They fail to join unions
and develop political consciousness, they are exploited by an indifferent capi-
talist system, and their work morally compromises them. It is not a great leap
for Korolenko, who was deeply interested in the question of blood libel,16 to
make two conceptual transfers from meat to murder and murder to canni-
balism, the latter a common trope in critiques of capitalism. As Korolenko con-
tinues, he confides the fear that his body too might be processed by the mind-
less worker and his practiced hands:

With some horror, I looked at this master of death . . . He, striking the next vic-
tim in the throat, still found time in the interval to nudge me with his elbow and
quickly hold up his hand. I hurriedly pulled out a coin and thrust it into his
hand. And then I suddenly thought, “What for?” . . . I unwillingly realized that
if by mistake my leg were to get caught in the rope and I were to roll toward
him on the track, he just might not stop that habitual movement of his prac-
ticed hand.17

Korolenko contends that what was once reverential and ritualized, as

described in Bakhtiarov’s account, is but mindless repetition in the industrial
slaughterhouse. His offer of a tip has the character of a bribe for his life, given
that the worker’s amputated hand has been sutured to an alien, industrial will,
at whose behest it performs habitual movements isolated from individual moral
considerations. Korolenko implies that the savage industrial worker is liable to
be indifferent to whether it is a cow or a man under his knife, for he himself has
been butchered into parts that he no longer controls. Such men cannot emerge
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 269

whole from the slaughterhouse or the factory: they are merely pieces of men—
hands, arms, muscles—performing algorithmic movements that engage a single
part of the body in an endlessly repetitive motion. Korolenko’s account sounds
an early warning about the human implications of industrialization and fears of
the mechanization of the body. Twenty years later, modernist artists, concerned
with the same issues now fully developed in Russian society would transform
those modern fears by aesthetic means.
The crucial link between the nineteenth century’s civic-minded realism,
which is demonstrated in Korolenko’s text, and the formal experimentation of
later modernist art, is Lev Tolstoy, whose artistic production, while ostensibly
oriented toward realism and moral didacticism, makes the body a site of proto-
modernist estrangement and fragmentation. Working on a diatribe of artistic
“idols” in What Is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?) and having already written exten-
sively on the perils of carnal passion, Tolstoy would complete his own elabora-
tion of the threefold Levitical injunction against “idols, fornication, and blood”
with “First Step” (“Pervaia stupen’”), a vegetarian tract with a notoriously
graphic description of animal slaughter. “First Step,” published in 1892, is
among Tolstoy’s later prose works, and it demonstrates modernist tendencies
in both its subject—the slaughterhouse, an exemplary site of modern fears con-
cerning the body—and its approach: a fragmenting literary process that Tol-
stoy also uses to treat human (and animal) consciousness.
In “First Step” Tolstoy gives an astonishingly detailed description of the
slaughter of several animals that stretches for several pages. A brief excerpt
demonstrates Tolstoy’s tone and style:

The first animal of his next lot was not an ox, but a bull—a fine, well-bred crea-
ture, black, with white spots on its legs, young, muscular, full of energy. He was
dragged forward, but he lowered his head and resisted sturdily. Then the
butcher who followed behind seized the tail, like an engine-driver [mashinist]
grasping the handle of a whistle, twisted it, the gristle crackled, and the bull
rushed forward, upsetting the men who held the rope. Then it stopped, looking
sideways with its black eyes, the whites of which had filled with blood.18

Tolstoy’s anthropomorphization of the bull secures the affiliation between ani-

mal slaughter and murder. Furthermore, the butcher is described as a “ma-
chinist tugging on a whistle.” The word machinist specifically refers to a driver of
steam engines, Tolstoy’s favorite symbol of modernity. As Olga Matich notes,
Tolstoy’s description of slaughter also has a “displaced sexual subtext” that is
crucial to a larger theme of dismemberment in his work.19 Fornication, the
consumption of meat, murder, and fragmentation are closely affiliated in the
270     

poetics of disgust. Matich’s reading of Tolstoy emphasizes his fetishization of

body parts—whether they belong to the soldier in The Sevastopol Stories, the adul-
teress in Anna Karenina, or the animal and worker in “First Step.” Beyond the
thematics of Tolstoy’s interest in dismemberment are the mechanisms within
his prose that dissect processes, appearances, and perceptions. In short, this
very fetishization of parts informs not only the themes of Tolstoy’s work but
also his narrative form and marks his position on the cusp between realism and
modernism.
In the following passage, Tolstoy attempts to elicit moral outrage from his
readers by evoking sensory disgust. Ultimately, however, his strategy is checked
by his own aesthetic fascination:

That day about a hundred head of cattle were slaughtered. I was on the point of
entering one of the chambers, but stopped short at the door. I stopped both be-
cause the chamber was crowded with carcasses which were being moved about,
and also because blood was flowing on the floor and dripping from above. All
the butchers present were besmeared with blood, and had I entered I, too,
should certainly have been covered with it. One suspended carcass was being
taken down, another was being moved toward the door, a third, a slaughtered
ox, was lying with its white legs raised, while a butcher with a strong hand was
ripping up its tight-stretched hide.20

“In art, blood is not bloody,” writes Viktor Shklovsky, an astute interpreter of
Tolstoy, in Theory of Prose. “It just rhymes with ‘flood.’ It is material either for a
structure of sound or for a structure of images. For this reason, art is pitiless, or
rather without pity, apart from those cases where the feeling of sympathy forms
the material for the artistic structure. But even in that case, we must consider it
from the point of view of composition. Similarly, if we want to understand how
a certain machine works, we examine its drive belt first. That is, we consider
this detail from the standpoint of a machinist and not, for instance, from the
standpoint of a vegetarian.”21 Formalists, like Shklovsky, warn us not to be dis-
tracted by the thematics, like Tolstoy’s in “First Step,” but rather to look at
their function in the textual “machine”; “blood” is merely a formal effect, with-
out affect—part of an overarching “structure of images” that drives a work.
Reading “First Step,” one has the impression that Tolstoy does make art from
his description of the slaughterhouse in spite of both his moral outrage and his
late-career disgust for the “idols” of art. Tolstoy’s control over the lockstep
mechanism of diegetic violence and narrative production propels his text away
from its ostensible moral strategy; slaughter becomes aestheticized: pleasurable
to both reader and writer. As Matich argues, the disgust evoked by slaughter is
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 271

morally ambivalent but aesthetically unequivocal. Tolstoy may have set out to
expose the immorality of real slaughter, but instead he left his reader with a
taste for the artistic slaughter.

Fr om Hig h Mode r nism t o Revo l u t i o n

In Petersburg, the canonical Russian modernist novel about revolution, Andrey

Bely, like Tolstoy, demonstrates the implicit links between the industrial age
and the fragmentation of bodies, whether it is accomplished through violence
or through art. As Olga Matich discusses in “Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die
in Petersburg,” the murder of the revolutionary Lippanchenko demonstrates
Petersburg ’s fixation on slaughter, although the guiding image here is not of the
cow, but of the pig. The novel also concerns a would-be revolutionary’s involve-
ment in a plot to assassinate his father, a prominent government official, with a
bomb. That assassination never comes off, though it is graphically imagined by
the characters—one dramatic vision, for example, consisting of human skin
“sticking” to the wall.22 Bely’s revolutionaries, however, accomplish their real
destruction through the narrative rather than the bomb. Here slaughter is
made modernist by dint of its transition from theme to aesthetic process, that is,
the montage of events that reflect the structure of modern life in the novel.
Much of Petersburg’s fragmented narrative is concerned with the explosion of the
human form and consciousness, an act which is associated with revolution and
modernity. In a tavern scene, a certain slaughterman (literally, “bull killer”; by-
koboets), Anofriev of the Petersburg city slaughterhouse, makes an incidental ap-
pearance while a popular musical number of the day plays in the background:

“Slaughterman Anofriev!”
“Your honor!”
“Slaughterman of the city slaughterhouse . . . Have a seat . . .”
“Waiter!”
“Yes, what can I do for you?”
“Waiter: put on ‘The Negro’s Dream’ . . .”
And the pipes of the machine mooed in greeting to the slaughterman, like a
bull under the knife of a bull-slaughterer.23

The narrator’s confusion of humans, steer, and machines is not confined to

musical instruments, however. Bely creates a montage of human and animal
organs in the following scene, as Nikolay Apollonovich discusses blood ties with
a shady police agent over a dinner of “kidneys with madeira”:
272     

“Yes-yes-yes; a most curious, a most peculiar little point . . . Wonderful: I’ll

have kidneys with madeira, and for you . . . also some kidneys?”
“What point is that?”
“Waiter, two orders of kidneys . . . Will you permit me to inquire about this
most curious little point? Well, here’s the thing—I confess: our ties—the ties
that bind us—the nature of those ties . . .”
“?”
“They are ties of blood . . .”
“Ties of blood?”
At that moment they brought the kidneys.24

Here Petersburg ’s theme of the revolutionary overthrow of paternalistic gov-

ernment is affiliated with meat, as the “ties of blood” become literalized (and
parodied) through a plate of kidneys, internal organs that filter blood. Like the
“slaughterhouse wail” of the musical machine in the background, the menu
echoes the obsession with meat and dismemberment in the novel’s fevered
imagination.
In the section “I Destroy Irrevocably” (“Ia gubliu bez vozvrata”), the de-
scription of a modern musical machine (a gramophone, one speculates) re-
peats, nearly verbatim, the preceding description of the tavern’s soundscape:
“The animal wail of machines could be heard: the cry of a gigantic bull whose
throat is being cut at the slaughterhouse: tambourines—bursting, bursting,
bursting.”25 For the sound-conscious Bely, the music of modernity is a vocaliza-
tion of the animal in the slaughterhouse. In Between Two Revolutions (Mezhdu
dvukh revoliutsii ), Bely situates this subchapter in the context of his musings
about how the “horrors of capitalism” were the “mechanical result of a social
construction.”26 Whether or not we trust the author’s ex post facto positioning
of his work, Bely’s “horrors of capitalism” are uniquely packaged in the text as
this gramophone abattoir.
Urbanization and industrialization are modernism’s fellow travelers, and
Petersburg attempts to come to terms with their effects on the body through liter-
ary fragmentation, a prophylactic, immunizing response to modern psychic as-
saults. Walter Benjamin cites shock as a defining feature of modernity, offering
it as the experience of the worker and flâneur alike in the industrial-age city:
“The shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds
to the isolated ‘experiences’ of the worker at his machine.”27 Shock, then, is a
register of the spatial, temporal, and psychic displacements associated with
modernity; of the demands upon our attention, our bodies, and our senses that
prevent us from attaining integrated perceptions. Likewise, modern industrial
processes dissolve work into algorithms, sequestering the worker from other
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 273

phases of production and preventing him or her from ever having the satis-
faction of completion. In this extrapolation of corporeal dismemberment, the
modern body and its agency are fragmented and reintegrated into a different
sort of economic unit and “social body”: under capitalism, the worker is en-
folded into the basic unit of business, the corporation, and later, under social-
ism, into the collective.
As industrialization and modernity deprived the subject of its wholeness
and integrity, rendering the body, time, and labor and leisure processes alike
into fragmented or disjointed units, so too did they advertise their power to re-
store wholeness, often by way of the social body and its commercial culture.
Tim Armstrong writes that “modernity . . . brings both a fragmentation and
augmentation of the body in relation to technology; it offers the body as lack at
the same time as it offers technological compensation. Increasingly, that com-
pensation is offered as a part of capitalism’s fantasy of the complete body: in
the mechanisms of advertising, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery and cinema; all
prosthetic in the sense that they promise the perfection of the body.”28 Arm-
strong notes that all of these products offer the illusion of wholeness to a frag-
mented self. In the processing of organic materials into synthetic ones, society
was transforming the human body on another plane: cosmetics, fashion,
health tonics, and even cinema with its gelatin-emulsified film stocks—all
made from animal by-products—transformed the human body in our percep-
tion. Our entry into the fragmenting, dismembering, and synthesizing realm of
modernity was inexorably tied to slaughter, as Soviet writers of the 1920s
would observe.

T h e Spec t a c le of Sla ug ht er : S ovi et L i fe

In a short piece, “About Horses” (“O loshadiakh”), for the New Life (Novaia
zhizn’ ), Isaac Babel discusses the slaughter of horses for meat in 1918 Petrograd
as the city struggled in the throes of starvation. He reports that 500–600 horses
were slaughtered per day, up from a mere 30–40 in prior years:
Now first-class work horses, three-year-olds, four-year-olds are all going to-
gether under the knife. Everyone is selling—cabbies, draymen, private owners,
and local peasants.
The process of “dehorseification” is going on with frightening speed, and
this is before spring, before the work season. Moving steam power is disappear-
ing catastrophically. The same thing is happening with living power—which
we so need. Will anything at all remain?29
274     

Babel’s chief fear seems to be for the decline of the work force—horsepower
is literally disappearing from the city. But the subtext of city history nuances
the symbolism: all of Petrograd’s fit men were being swallowed into the Red
Guard in this first year of Russia’s Civil War. The two faces of slaughter—
animal and human, literal and metaphorical—are implied in Babel’s vision of
the City Slaughterhouse. As “About Horses” closes, Babel conveys the moral
desperation of a Russian butcher in a tavern near the City Slaughterhouse:
“What can you do? Before only the Tatars ate horse meat, but now everyone
does, even gentlemen.” Just as the authors of The Meat Question had observed in
1910, when Russians did consume horsemeat, the act was a major disruption in
Russia’s deep cultural traditions around meat production and slaughter, even
a trespass against the sanctity of life. In Babel’s “On Horses,” the profanity of
butchering and consuming workhorses recalled the wasteful fratricide of
Russia’s Civil War.
Babel’s violent prose heralded a new phase of modernism in Russian litera-
ture. Konarmiia (Red Cavalry), a cycle of stories drawn from the author’s experi-
ences with the Budyonny campaign, inaugurated a decade of such cycles and
other fragmented genres. Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and
Yury Olesha were just a few of the writers of the 1920s and early 1930s who es-
chewed traditional narratives and experimented with more fractured forms. It
is no coincidence that many of these writers also turned explicitly to the theme
of slaughter in their writings—a commentary on the effects of modernity and a
metacommentary on the techniques of modernism.
Modernism in Russia never stabilized as a unified movement, interrupted
as it was by the 1917 Revolution. Its tools and ideas, however, were taken up by
various aesthetic movements in the early decades of the twentieth century, all
of which offered fresh perspectives on the human body: biomechanics treated
theater as a laboratory of human physiology; constructivism treated the body
as raw material to be cut, manipulated, and re-formed; cubism attempted to
capture subjects through multiple points of view, exceeding the bounds of sin-
gular, fixed spatial perspective. Because modernist art turned on the fragmen-
tation and realignment of representations of the world and human body, its
tools were not incompatible with early Soviet art’s self-stated mission of form-
ing the new man. The Soviet body was material to be manipulated at will: its
form, limits, and appetites were all being radically reassessed and reshaped.
Mayakovsky’s 1926 essay, “Hog Butcher of the World” (“Svinoboi mira”;
the title refers to Carl Sandberg’s Chicago—“hog butcher for the world”30) is a
Soviet answer to Korolenko’s “Factory of Death.” Mayakovsky argues that
Chicago is America’s true capital, the center of the proletarian movement:
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 275

Chicago (despite the contradictions of official guides) is the capital of the

United States . . .
It is the true capital, the true heart of industry and profit, and also the heart
of the battle of the American proletariat.
This heart appears to be a truly bloody heart, for the chief beating of the life
of the city is the knacker’s yard, the slaughterhouse . . .
A machine lifts live squealing pigs onto a hook, having hooked their feet,
and hurls them in an uninterrupted line—they crawl head-over-heels past an
Irishman or a Negro, who cuts the pig’s throat with a knife. “Each one slaughters
a few thousand pigs a day,” bragged the slaughterhouse guide.31

Mayakovsky’s description of the slaughterhouse closely resembles Korolenko’s

and Tolstoy’s before him, despite its superficial attempt to valorize this most
stigmatized of industries. Mayakovsky fails to uncouple the horrors of the capi-
talist slaughterhouse from industrial labor itself, and, as in Tolstoy’s “First
Step,” his appeal to physical disgust detracts from the political dimension of his
narrative. Mayakovsky describes a flowing “sea of blood,” animal cries that re-
sound the world over, and the acrid “stench” of animal urine and feces. These
latter grotesque products of animal digestion imply the larger processes of in-
dustrial and economic digestion practiced upon them, suggesting that, what-
ever Mayakovsky’s political message may be, the slaughterhouse can never be
other than a site of disgust and exploitation.
Meanwhile, Yury Olesha offers a detailed account of the by-products of
slaughter in his novel Envy (Zavist’ ). Andrey Babichev, a hero of Rabelaisian
tastes and Rubenesque proportions, works as a manager for the state food-
industry. Babichev’s young assistant, Kovalerov, edits the following report on
the uses of animal by-products:
“And so, blood collected during slaughter may be processed either for food, in
the production of sausage, or for the manufacture of light or dark albumin,
glue, buttons, paint, fertilizers, and feed for cattle, birds, and fish. Raw lard
from every type of cattle and fatty organic offal—for the preparation of edible
oils: lard, margarine, artificial butter, and industrial oils: stearine, glycerine,
and lubricating oils. Sheep heads and feet can, with the aid of electrical spiral
drills, automatic-action cleaning machines, gas-operated lathes, slicing ma-
chines, and scalding vats, be processed into food products, bone oil, and various
items from sterilized wool and bones.”32

Olesha’s technical report on Soviet industry’s complete processing of organic

life metaphorizes the rendering of the new Soviet man. The report also fails to
convince his reader of the glory of the grand projects of industry, instead sug-
gesting that Soviet man is merely rendered by the machine of the state.
276     

Ten years after his reportage on the horses of Petrograd, Babel would
again observe the spectacle of horse slaughter during collectivization. In the
story “Kolyvushka,” Babel tells the story of a peasant who prefers to slaughter
his pregnant mare—referred to as his “daughter”—rather than surrender her
to the state.33 If scarcity drove the slaughter of animals in “On Horses,” then
it is a grotesque surfeit that motivates the butchery in “Kolyvushka.” Peasants
in Russia are reported to have slaughtered nearly half of all livestock during
collectivization (1928–33).34 Along with Babel and Mikhail Sholokhov, An-
drey Platonov treated this historical moment in bizarre episodes of vicarious
self-destruction. In the short novel The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan), Platonov de-
scribes the grotesque village scene in which peasants slaughter and devour
their animals:
. . . the earth was black, because the warm blood of cows and sheep had come
out from under the fence outside . . . Having liquidated the last breathing, liv-
ing inventory, the peasants began to eat the beef and even called all the servants
to feast; the beef in a short time had been eaten like Communion—nobody
wanted to eat, but the flesh of their own slaughtered had to be hidden in their
bodies and kept from being collectivized. Some calculating peasants had long
been bloated from eating the meat and went about heavily, like moving barns;
others vomited endlessly, but they could not part with their cattle and destroyed
it to the very bones, figuring it was no use to their stomachs. Those who had
managed ahead of time to eat their livestock, or had let it go into the custody
of the collective farm, now lay in an empty coffin and lived in it, as in a tight
courtyard, feeling an enclosed peace.35

Platonov’s peasants experience a grotesque, materialist “Communion” with

their animals, devouring them before settling into their graves. Platonov’s
work frequently features animals cum humans and vice versa, as he blurs the
line between human and animal bodies. The exemplary Soviet worker in The
Foundation Pit, Misha, is never described as anything other than a bear, testing
the limits of the metaphor and realistic representation with it. No longer are
humans and animals merely analogized, they merge in chimerical literary fig-
urations that are neither metaphorical nor realistic. In a later story, “The
Cow” (“Korova”), Platonov backs away from his radical metaphorization, fo-
cusing instead on the organic connection between the human and the animal.
The nameless cow of the title begins to grieve after her calf is sold for slaughter
and finally commits suicide on the train tracks adjoining the family field.
Vasya, the young boy whose family owned the cow, writes a eulogy for his
school essay:
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 277

“We had a cow. When she lived, my mother, father, and I drank milk from her.
Then she had a son of her own—a calf, and he also drank milk from her, we
were three and he made a fourth, but there was enough for all. The cow still
plowed and carried loads. Then her son was sold for meat. The cow started to
mourn and soon died from a train. And she was also eaten, because she was
beef. The cow gave us everything: milk, her son, meat, leather, insides, and
bones, she was good-hearted. I remember our cow and will never forget her.”36

Beyond the obvious literary nod to Anna Karenina’s death under the
wheels of a train, the classic nineteenth-century symbol of modernity, the story
has a stubborn materialism that speaks to the fate of the human body in the So-
viet state: it carries loads, it gives away its sons, it is worked to death and then
devoured by the state. Platonov’s cow resembles his struggling, laboring
human characters, although she is described as unable to comfort herself with
words or consciousness or some other distraction, “as a person could do.” Yet,
in fact, none of Platonov’s pitiful human characters ever manage to comfort
or distract themselves, nor do they ever attain the “humanity”—definitively
Soviet—to which they aspire. For Platonov’s workers as for the nameless cow,
the body, so long as language and consciousness fail, remains meat.

From Sla ug ht er t o Mo n t a ge:

Mode r nism C ome s o f A ge

As the historian of photography Beaumont Newhall writes, “the perfection of

gelatin emulsion not only led to the conquest, analysis, and synthesis of action,
but it brought about standardization of materials and the scientific investiga-
tion of the photographic process.”37 It was not lost on early Soviet filmmakers
that the principle material of film emulsion was gelatin—a slaughterhouse by-
product obtained from the bones, skin, and sinews of cattle. In addition to inte-
grating footage of the slaughter of cows into their films, filmmakers Dziga Ver-
tov and Sergey Eisenstein were conspicuous advancers of the art of montage,
consciously affiliating modernism’s tools of dislocation, juxtaposition, and
montage with slaughter in their work.
In his manifesto “Cine-Eye” (“Kino-glaz”), Dziga Vertov deploys the trope
of slaughter, declaring that his new Soviet man is culled from the best cuts: “I
take the strongest and most agile hands from one man, the fastest and best pro-
portioned legs from another, the most handsome and expressive head from a
third and through montage I create a new, perfect man.”38 In the same essay,
278     

Still shot from Dziga Vertov’s Kino-glaz, 1924

Vertov writes in his antigrammatical fashion: “the intestines [of cinema] are
tumbling out. The entrails of experience from the stomach of cinema disem-
boweled.”39 Vertov literally transfers this disembowelment to the screen in his
film Cine-Eye (Kino-glaz, 1924), using footage of the slaughter of a bull to demon-
strate the possibilities of the new film medium. “We give the bull back his
entrails,” and “We dress the bull in its skin,” claim the intertitles before we see
the footage of the slaughter run backward.40 Human and animal subjects alike
present raw material to Vertov’s camera to be manipulated, cut, and reorga-
nized at will, spatially and temporally.
Eisenstein put slaughter to a rather different use in his 1925 film Strike
(Stachka). In a dialectical montage sequence, he inserts “documentary,” nondie-
getic footage of the slaughter of a bull into a scene in which workers and their
families confront an armed police force. Eisenstein’s nondiegetically linked
ideas are intended to produce meaning through their collision, inducing shock
and manipulating viewers on a physiological level. Richard Stites notes of the
period that “in all these Constructivist and Taylorist art movements, one dis-
cerns, as in futurism and related genres, the desire for speed, efficiency, angu-
larity, and ‘industrialness’ . . . as psychic weapons leveled against the body, the
mental and the social lyricism and pastoral grace that the new generation asso-
ciated with utter weakness, pallid gentility, and sloth.”41 Eisenstein’s dialectical
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 279

montage could indeed be considered a weapon against classical bodies and

classical narratives, subjecting viewers and actors to physiological experimen-
tation and film texts to the butchery of montage.

Meat in t he Revolut iona r y I m a g i n a t i o n :

A Post sc ript

Although this essay has been primarily concerned with the relationship between
material culture and the themes and techniques of modernist aesthetics, the role
of meat in the mythopoesis of the Russian Revolution deserves some attention,
for in the revolutionary imagination, meat became both a symbol and a cause
of revolution, offering a strange case of the materialization of rhetoric. Spoiled
meat reputedly incited the men of the Potemkin to mutiny in 1905, an event that
Soviet filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein mythologized in his film The Battleship Potem-
kin (Bronenosets Potemkin), released in 1926, a year after Strike. The Lena Goldfields
Massacre of 1912, another watershed moment in revolutionary history, was also
said to have been spurred by the sale of spoiled horse meat at a company shop in
an isolated Siberian mining town on the banks of the Lena River. And Aleksey
Ivanovich Putilov, a chief shareholder in the Lena Goldfields Company, had his
own role in fanning the flames of Russia’s revolutionary imagination: his Russo-
Asian Bank oversaw the refurbishment and modernization of the struggling
Putilov munitions factory in Petersburg. The once nearly insolvent company,
torn by labor disputes in its prerevolutionary years, was propped up by govern-
ment munitions contracts for Russia’s enormously unpopular involvement in
World War I, which called young men to the front to serve as pushechnoe miaso—
“cannon meat.” All of this suggests rich material for an embodied history of
revolution, the aims of which temporarily coincided with the avant-garde art,
literature, and cinema of the 1920s and early 1930s.

Just as Petersburg’s pedestrians are unaware that the sidewalks beneath their
feet were once trod by cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse, so too are
modern literary travelers unable to behold the soil beneath the historical city’s
cultural thoroughfares without a guide. The Internet allows today’s traveler to
excavate various layers of narrative, to carve up hyperspace, and like Bely’s
narrator, to reassemble and render meaning at will. Moreover, the contempo-
rary experience of hyperspace is akin to that of Benjamin’s worker and flâneur.
As we sit at our own “machines,” endlessly distracted by the sensory experience
of hyperspace, we are subject to our own modern variety of psychic shock. The
280     

recent explosion of digital-map-based media and “topographical narratives,” if

our genre may be so termed, is perhaps attributable to the digital map’s sutur-
ing of psychic and physical space; a buffering against the shock of physical dis-
location that one often feels surfing the Web. The addresses of our digital map
in Mapping Petersburg are not merely hypertext protocols, they are indices of
physical space, lived history, and material culture. In the Web site that accom-
panies this essay, “Anatomizing Modernity,” I have tried to encourage the user
to reimagine the historical space of the city—to visualize relationships between
spaces in the city that are not physically contiguous but nonetheless linked con-
ceptually and narratively. Hyperspace environments allow us to understand
real environments in just such new ways, holding layers of history and compet-
ing narratives of the past in simultaneous suspension. I hope that the user of the
Web-based map will feel empowered in much the way that modernists were in
creating their narratives through montage and juxtaposition, finding new ways
to link physical and conceptual spaces.
In this essay, I have tried to demonstrate that the single trope of slaughter
seemed to capture the fears within Russian society in the early twentieth
century—capitalist exploitation and the shocks of industrialization, war, collec-
tivization, and revolution—and that this trope was translated, powerfully, into
an aesthetic tool. Modernist art, literature, and cinema offered new means of
reflecting upon modern assaults on the body by enacting their own aesthetic
violence against form. Not only was modernist literary, cinematic, and artistic
production concerned with the themes of dismemberment, fragmentation, and
dislocation of the body, but it also made the processes of slaughter its own
through fragmentation, mechanization, shock, and montage. What began as
Tolstoy’s literary anatomies and dissections would later become part of an artis-
tic mode that culminated in modernism’s use of the fragment and montage. This
violation of form was the chief means by which modernists—revolutionaries,
constructivists, and montageurs alike—disassembled and processed their envi-
ronment, rendering by each juxtaposition of cuts a higher aesthetic unity.


The title and the exposition of this paper owe much to Catherine Gallagher and
Stephen Greenblatt’s essay “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination,” in Practicing
New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
1. V. A Vityazeva and B. M. Kirikov, eds., Leningrad: Putevoditel’ (Leningrad:
Lenizdat, 1986), 287.
2. Putevoditel’ po S.-Peterburgu (Leningrad: IKAR, 1991), 123.
3. Isaac Babel, “O loshadiakh,” Novaia zhizn’, March 16, 1918.
4. Anatoly Bakhtiarov, Briukho Peterburga (St. Petersburg: Fert, 1994), 20.
M ea t in Ru s s i a ’s Mo de r n i s t I ma g i n a ti on 281

5. R. E. F Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of
Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 260–74.
6. Elly Bogdanov, Miasnoi vopros v Rossii i sovremennoe polozhenie skoto- i miasopromyshlen-
nosti v Rossii (Moscow: Izd. Komiteta Moskovskoi promyshlennosti i miasnoi birzhi,
1912), 3.
7. Petersburg scholar Anatoly Bakhtiarov estimates in his labor-oriented descrip-
tion of the meat industry at the turn of the century, Briukho Peterburga (The Belly of Pe-
tersburg), that 150,000 Caucasian bulls were shipped into Petersburg each year. For a
city whose population was approaching one and a half million (between 1900 and
1910), this amounted to approximately one cow for every ten inhabitants per year. See
also St.-Petersburg: A Sketch with a Plan and Index (St. Petersburg: Gorodskaia uprava,
1914), 23.
8. Podarok molodym khoziaikam went through twenty editions between 1861 and 1917.
9. Bakhtiarov, Briukho Peterburga, 20, 42–44.
10. Ibid., 44.
11. Ibid., 28.
12. David Bradshaw, A Concise Companion to Modernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2003), 168.
13. Bakhtiarov, Briukho Peterburga, 23, 26.
14. Such communal living arrangements were not unusual, even for married
workers.
15. Vladimir Korolenko, “Fabrika smerti,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Mos-
cow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1954), 152.
16. Korolenko and many prominent intellectuals responded with outrage to the
Beilis affair of 1913, in which a Jew was accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy.
It was widely believed that Jews consumed the blood of Christian children during Pass-
over rituals. For more on the Beilis case, see Jews on Trial, ed. Robert A. Garber ( Jersey
City, NJ: Ktav, 2004).
17. Korolenko, “Fabrika smerti,” 153.
18. Leo Tolstoy, “The First Step,” in Essays and Letters, trans. Aylmer Maude (Lon-
don: G. Richards, 1903), 88.
19. Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin-de-Siècle (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 36–46.
20. Tolstoy, “The First Step,” 86–87. Tolstoy’s prose here recalls Baudelaire’s
“Une Charogne” (“Carrion”), a poetic description of the putrefying corpse of a cow.
The two works, in very different ways, push the limits of aesthetic pleasure.
21. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dal-
key Archive Press, 1990), 159. In the original Russian, the rhyme is krov’ and liubov’ (blood
and love).
22. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 329–30.
For further reading, see Olga Matich’s “Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Petersburg”
in this volume.
23. Bely, Peterburg, 43.
24. Ibid., 208.
25. Ibid., 212.
26. Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1990), 282.
282     

27. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans.
Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), 73.
28. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3.
29. Babel, “O loshadiakh.” Within months of publishing Babel’s story, Maksim
Gorky’s newspaper Novaia zhizn’ (New Life) would be shut down by the censorship office
for peddling, in Lenin’s words, “intelligentsia pessimism.”
30. Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” in Chicago Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1992), 3.
31. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Svinoboi mira,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7 (Mos-
cow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958), 354–55.
32. Yury Olesha, Zavist’ in Izbrannoe (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1974), 29.
33. Isaac Babel, “Kolyvushka,” in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 3 (Mos-
cow: Vremia, 2006), 160. See also Carol Avins, “Isaac Babel’s Tales of Collectivization:
Rites of Transition in the New Soviet Village,” Slavic Review 64, no. 3 (2005): 560–79.
34. V. P. Danilov, ed., Ocherki istorii kollektivizatsii (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1963), 45.
According to Danilov, 42.6 percent of all cattle, 47 percent of all horses, and 65.1 per-
cent of all sheep in the country were slaughtered by peasants between 1928 and 1933.
35. Andrey Platonov, Kotlovan: Tekst, Materialy tvorcheskoi istorii (St. Petersburg:
Nauka, 2000), 86.
36. Andrey Platonov, “Korova,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudo-
zhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 359.
37. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1939 to the Present Day (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 91.
38. Dziga Vertov, “Cine-Eye: A Revolution,” in The Film Factory, ed. Richard Tay-
lor and Ian Christie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 93.
39. Ibid., 90.
40. Dziga Vertov, Kino-glaz [videorecording], production of the Film Office of
Goskino; film organized by Dziga Vertov (New York: Kino on Video, c. 1999). Transla-
tion here of Russian intertitles by Yuri Tsivian in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the
Twenties (Gemona, Udine: Le Giornate del cinema muto, 2004), 12.
41. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the
Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 161.
 11
The Fluid Margins
Flâneurs of the Karpovka River

         

Following t he F low in S ea rc h
of Urba n Mea ni n g

Scholarship about Petersburg’s modernity and the life of the city usually fo-
cuses on the chronotopes of the center, and the reader steeped in this tradition
might be somewhat puzzled by my essay’s attention to a river—and to the rela-
tively marginal Karpovka River at that—as a pathway into modern Peters-
burg. This reader might ask, Why a river? Why the Karpovka?
The decision to concentrate on this small river on the outskirts of Peters-
burg as a way of charting urban modernity was prompted, unexpectedly, by
Charles Baudelaire. In his essay “On the Heroism of Modern Life” (1846),
Baudelaire defines the city of modernité through the concept of fluidity. Evoking
“the spectacle of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences—
criminals and kept women—that drift about in the underworlds of a great
city,” Baudelaire declares that contemporary life “is rich in poetic and mar-
velous subjects. [. . .] The marvelous,” he writes, “envelops and soaks us like an
atmosphere, but we don’t see it.”1
A half century later, the modernists of Petersburg echoed Baudelaire’s
image of “floating” urban sensation, but they developed the image in nega-
tive terms. Andrey Bely and Alexander Blok perceived the main avenues of
the imperial capital to be choked by flow that evoked feelings of disgust. The

283
284          

Baudelairian notion of floating (existences flottantes), with its potential to tempt

and inspire the city dweller, is perceived by them as teeming and swarming
(kishenie, medlenno tekushchaia gushcha) that confines the individual within the
claustrophobic limitations of the crowd.2 In Petersburg Bely depicts the “viscous
and slowly flowing sediment” of Nevsky, whose “damp space poured together
a myria-distinction of voices into a myria-distinction of words. All the words
jumbled and again wove into a sentence; and the sentence seemed meaning-
less. It hung above the Nevsky, a black haze of phantasmata.”3 For Bely, float-
ing Nevsky Prospect threatens to subvert urban distinctions. It creates a decep-
tive unit of syntax: ordered, yet meaningless.4 Such urban texture does not
envelop; rather, it lures the citizen with the promise of meaning then disorients
and enslaves him. In his notebooks Blok writes similarly and squeamishly about
the “strindbergovshchina of Petersburg in May: peculiar swarming of streets (the
most disgusting being Nevsky and Karavannaya).”5 The pejorative noun strind-
bergovshchina here refers to the cult of the Swedish playwright August Strind-
berg, whose plays some believed contributed to moral decline and degenera-
tion. In his use of the term, Blok condemns the questionable mores of the
fashionable crowd.
The contrast between such intensely polemical descriptions of Petersburg
and Baudelaire’s enthusiastic image of the “floating existences” of the modern
city raises the question whether one might find any forms of symbolic floating
in the text of fin-de-siècle Petersburg that would “envelop and soak” the
painter of modern life rather than repel him. This challenge points in the direc-
tion of the city’s rivers—for where, if not on a river bank, could a city dweller
experience the literal and symbolic powers of urban flow at once? The Kar-
povka, which runs across the northern part of the city known as the Petrograd
Side, envelops a locale in which the antithetical extremes of urban society have
long met and mixed.6 Those who strolled along the banks of the Karpovka at
the turn of twentieth century encountered decrepit slums, modernist buildings
of the new bourgeoisie, aristocratic mansions, and the impressive facades of
industrial giants—all mingling in surprising proximity. Here, on the margins of
the city, far from the censorship of the central avenues, a new concept of city life
was emerging. According to Blok, an observant flâneur of the Karpovka and its
vicinities, the “real” life of modern Petersburg was taking place right there at
Bolshoy and Kamennoostrovsky avenues, which cross the Karpovka on the Pe-
tersburg/Petrograd Side, and in the multitude of tiny streets and alleys that run
between the avenues and “weave” them together into a peculiar web: “Real
manifestations of life accidentally enter the street (hooligans, breaking street-
lamps and beating each other up, drunk in a streetcar, wife and husband on
T h e Flu id M ar g i n s 285

Bolshoy Avenue).” Later, Blok calls Bolshoy “the main avenue of today’s
Petersburg—since Nevsky lost its meaning.”7
Blok’s observation is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s admiration of the way
in which the underworld of Paris broke into the open in the process of the
poet’s observational flânerie: “criminals and kept women” became the subjects of
Baudelaire’s urban poetry in the same way that hooligans and prostitutes came
to signify “real” life for Blok.8 We see Blok opposing the strindbergovshchina of
Nevsky to the brutal authenticity of Bolshoy.9 In more general terms, Blok crit-
icizes the strindbergovshchina of Nevsky as a disease of redundant literariness. The
“real” life of Bolshoy attracts him as a yet unpolished and unnarrativized tab-
ula rasa on which he can write his modern text. In this context, Bolshoy be-
comes a transitional space, similar to those that, according to T. J. Clark, at-
tracted impressionist painters for their quality of being “edgy, ill-fitting, or
otherwise unfinished.”10 In opposition to Bely’s diagnosis of Nevsky Prospect as
an urban zone of exhausted meaning, Blok’s Bolshoy promises to discover and
define new meanings of and for urban modernity by putting intimate, secret
personal life (e.g., that of delinquency and marriage) right out on the public
street located on the margins of the city.
In order to define the meaning of flânerie along the banks of the Karpovka,
my essay often falls back on one of the key theoretical figures of our project—
the poet-flâneur, as defined by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project. Accord-
ing to Benjamin, his prototype was Baudelaire, who formulated modernity as
a culturally crucial spaciotemporal realm that is inalienable from the life of
the metropolis. While Adrian Wanner claims that Blok, the main focus of this
essay, was “reticent about his relationship to the French poet” and that his
reaction to Baudelaire was opaque,11 it is nonetheless helpful to assess Blok’s
flânerie through the lens of Benjamin’s construction of Baudelaire’s experi-
ence. Benjamin’s understanding of flânerie as a practice aimed at blurring
borders between exterior and interior is reinforced in this essay by Gaston
Bachelard’s elaborations on the nature and contradictions of spatial intimacy.
Applying Benjamin’s and Bachelard’s astute readings of Baudelaire’s
flânerie to the practice of flânerie along Petersburg’s Karpovka River, my essay
concentrates on three symptomatic texts in the history of the district: Evgeny
Grebyonka’s physiological sketch “Petersburg Side” (“Petersburgskaya Sto-
rona,” 1844), which examines the site in the throes of the energetic nineteenth-
century boom of Petersburg’s financial and social glamour; Blok’s poems and
diary entries from the first decade of the twentieth century, a time of self-
proclaimed and, paradoxically, inspirational crisis of culture and the arts in Pe-
tersburg; and art works by Dmitry Mitrokhin from 1927, in which the insistent
286          

depiction of the backwaters of the Karpovka at the end of the 1920s became
a metaphor for the marginalizing of Petersburg modernism in Soviet art.
Tracing the relationships between these works elucidates how Karpovka flâ-
nerie and its representations, which from their very beginning were a quest for
the marginal, acquired additional layers of meaning during the modernist
epoch in Russia.

Mode r nit y under Constr u c t i o n :

A P hy si olog ist ’s Tour of t he Pet er s bu r g S i de

Insofar as walking along the banks of the Karpovka entails walking through
the thick of the Petersburg/Petrograd Side, a semiotic analysis of the cultural
topography of this area seems to be in order. Once conceived as a place for
the rich and noble, the Petersburg Side had lost its social prestige by the
mid-nineteenth century and became a semiotically opaque zone of multiple
divisions and oppositions: social, cultural, architectural.12 This polyphony of
meanings, at once contradicting and echoing each other, was registered by
Evgeny Grebyonka (1812–48) in “Petersburg Side,” a sketch that was incor-
porated by Nikolay Nekrasov into his important anthology Physiology of Peters-
burg (1845).
For Grebyonka, the Petersburg Side in 1844, isolated from both the city
center’s aggressive glamour (Nevsky Prospect) and its aggressive poverty (Hay-
market [Sennaya] Square), became an urban space sui generis—not only of
impoverishment but, importantly, a locus of the past opposed to modernity:
If you are rich, if you live in the center of the city, if you float over the polished
carriage-way of Nevsky and Morskaya avenues, if your eyes are used to the
brightness of gaslights and splendor of the luxurious stores [. . .] I recommend
that you take a walk to the Petersburg [Side], the poorest part of our city, have
a look at the long narrow streets, many of which are not paved, with wooden
buildings—the further one gets from Bolshoy Avenue, the quieter, gloomier,
poorer it is. [. . .] Petersburg Side once was the best part of the city [. . .] but
later, cut off from the center by the river, lying close to the Northern swamps, it
started to decline and became a refuge for the poor. [. . .] Some poor clerk puts
together his modest capital and moves to the Petersburg Side to end his days
here: that’s how most of the Petersburg Side was built.13

The isolated nature of this area acquires a rather mythologized mode of char-
acterization in Grebyonka’s text, and even toponyms here border on fairy-tale
style, so that “servants of the nobility feel as if abroad on the Petersburg [Side],
T h e Flu id M ar g i n s 287

in a different part of the world” (91). Elsewhere, Grebyonka muses about street
names: “What kinds of streets are these! Turn off the main avenue and you’ll
encounter streets with diverse and incomprehensible names: Plutalova Street
[Straying Street], Teryaeva [ Losing Street], Dun’ka’s Alley, and even a street
that has a name and patronymic: Andrey Petrovich” (72). For Grebyonka, the
Petersburg Side is a locale of strangeness, which he visits as a tourist would visit
a foreign country. The area apophatically highlights the center of Petersburg,
of which it is a negative reflection.
So drastically removed from the temporality of the rest of modern Peters-
burg in the making is the Petersburg Side in Grebyonka’s narrative that he uses
a retrospectivist style to write about it. The literary program of realism fiercely
announced by the authors of Physiology of Petersburg seems to turn back for a mo-
ment to the description of ruins, giving way in Grebyonka’s essay to the inalien-
able topos of romanticism: “Some swindler built some time ago a wooden
shopping mall (Gostiny Dvor) at Maly Avenue. This building still exists, black
and dilapidated. [. . .] Everything in it is dead, black, windows and doors are
terribly dark, like eye sockets in a dead skull” (85). The ruin as a rhetorical de-
vice might be interpreted as a temporal palimpsest: the past here peeps through
the present, disturbingly. In a way the whole of Grebyonka’s Petersburg Side
functions as a ruin—it serves as a refuge from and reminder of the past, both
melancholic and ironic.
This area of “antimodernity” prohibits flânerie, the main method by which
the modern metropolis studies itself. Grebyonka admits with some disappoint-
ment, “You won’t meet inhabitants of the Petersburg Side in the streets, they
don’t walk. [. . .] There are no taverns here either” (75). The flâneur has to ar-
rive here from the outside, from the center of the city—as Grebyonka actually
does, hence the lack of intimacy between the observer and this site. The writer
does not see the area as his own urban past, but as the other: old-fashioned, patri-
archal, peculiar, and peculiarly inviting.
And still, although the writer presents a rather clear-cut image of the
Petersburg Side as opposed to the splendor of Nevsky, his depiction cannot be
called homogenous. He allows for exceptions and corrections to his scheme.
Grebyonka explains that he depicts the “majority of the inhabitants of Peters-
burg Side that create its local color,” yet admits that “there is also the clean and
beautiful Kamennoostrovsky Avenue, [. . .] where patriarchal life is vanishing”
(77). He complicates his notion of the irregular social distribution in the area
(the backwardness of the streets and fashionable splendor of the avenues) by
noting that the geographically and temporally isolated Petersburg Side was
chosen by many dachniki (summer residents) because it was “close to the islands,
288          

and first and foremost, not far from the city” (75). The remark affirms the image
of the Petersburg Side as an urban limbo of sorts, a zone of transition, a connec-
tive tissue between the aristocratic luxury and leisure of the islands (Krestovsky
and Elagin) and the industrial expansion and density of the city per se.
According to Grebyonka, the culturally complex and conflicted Petersburg
Side, with its “incredible and melancholic eclectics” (75), is an alternative zone
of urban modernity: on the whole, it belongs to the past and resists the pres-
ent, yet is traversed by areas of modernity—Kamennoostrovsky and Bolshoy
avenues—and serves as a polysemantic buffer between the two zones of urban
intensity and prestige: the center and its environs. Grebyonka treats the Peters-
burg Side with awe and anxiety, as a limbo that at once problematizes and en-
forces the meanings of the more developed urban areas. His perspective of the
bemused “foreigner” is drastically different from the passeistic belatedness of the
area. By contrast, our next city dweller, Blok, is le promeneur solitaire, a figure who
does not simply observe the area as a tourist but lives there and expresses him-
self through it.

Co n tra dic t ions of Int ima te F l â n er i e:

A l exande r Blok, Le Promeneur Solitaire

The next fifty years did not drastically change the status of the Petersburg
Side. The polarities, however, diverged even further: while the tiny back streets
continued to drown in dirt, poverty, and delinquency, “beautiful” Kamen-
noostrovsky turned into Petersburg’s main hothouse of modernity and art nou-
veau. From 1896 to 1917, fifty-six new stone buildings were erected along the
main avenues of the Petersburg Side, forty-two of them residential. Real estate
prices went up drastically: in 1885, a square sazhen (2,134 meters) cost 7 rubles;
by 1914, it cost 320. The area was becoming less and less isolated from the rest
of the city. The first streetcars began running along Kamennoostrovsky on
March 25, 1908. In summer a steamship would take people to the botanical
garden near the Karpovka. Three new bridges over the Karpovka appeared
during the period 1904–14.14 Grebyonka’s frustration with the absence of a
thriving restaurant life was allayed as well: the Petersburg restaurateur Domi-
nique, famous for his celebrated pirozhki, opened a coffee house on Kamen-
noostrovsky; taverns, with their less elegant red signboards, emerged near Ka-
mennoostrovsky Bridge.
Symptomatically, while Kamennoostrovsky was acquiring the status of
Petersburg’s fashionable Champs-Élysées, in the backyards of the avenue one
T h e Flu id M ar g i n s 289

could see wastelands and even vegetable gardens with cabbage. Osip Man-
delshtam reflected on this contrast in The Egyptian Stamp: the novel’s hero Parnok

was a man of Kamennoostrovsky Prospect—one of the lightest and most irre-

sponsible streets of Petersburg. In 1917, after the February days, this street be-
came still lighter with its steam laundries, its Georgian shops, where even cocoa
was still to be bought. . . . Venture neither to the right nor to the left: there is
bedlam, there is streetcar-less backwater. But on Kamennoostrovsky the street-
cars develop an unheard-of speed. Kamennoostrovsky: a feather-brained young
man with starch in his only two stone shirts and a sea-breeze in his streetcar-
filled head. It is a young dandy out of work, carrying its houses under its arm
like an idle fop returning with his airy bundle from the laundress.15

Mandelshtam wrote about belle époque Kamennoostrovsky Avenue retro-

spectively in 1926–27, close to the time when Benjamin was conceptualizing
Baudelaire’s urban legacy. Mandelshtam’s metaphor bridges the city and its
lonely flâneur, as the prospect itself turns into a “young dandy out of work”
with the knowledge and sentimentality of hindsight: during the Soviet 1920s,
the dandy of the belle époque lost his status, and the avenue lost its celebrated
name to become the Avenue of the Red Dawns.
The poetry and marginalia (diaries and notebooks) of Blok reveal the way
one city dweller experienced the immediate meaning of the area at the turn of
the century. The poet, whose stepfather, F. F. Piottukh, served in the Grena-
dier [Life Guards] Regiment, spent his youth (1889–1907) in the regiment bar-
racks on the Karpovka Embankment. After their marriage, Blok and his wife,
Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva-Blok, eventually moved to an apartment of
their own (41 Galernaya Street), but the Karpovka Embankment held its at-
traction for Blok throughout his life: in 1910 the poet returned to the Petersburg
Side (9 Malaya Monetnaya Street), where he could easily revisit the places of
his youth during walks.
Thanks to Blok’s friend the poet Sergey Gorodetsky, we have a description
of young Blok’s room at the Grenadier Regiment barracks: “His was a long
and narrow room with an antique couch, where Fyodor Dostoevsky liked to sit
during his visits to the Mendeelev family. An impeccably organized writing
table, a bookshelf with a hyacinth on it. On the wall there are portraits of Isa-
dora Duncan, Mona Lisa, and Nesterov’s Madonna. . . . Blok’s room was like
nobody else’s.”16
From his house Blok would walk daily along the embankment of the Kar-
povka to school at the Vvedenskaya Gymnasium (37 Bolshoy Prospect) and,
later, to Petersburg University on Vasilievsky Island. During these walks, Blok
290          

Grenadier regiment barracks on Karpovka Embankment, 2007 (photograph by Polina Barskova)

came to “own” the Karpovka: he became the solitary flâneur of its deserted
embankment. The poet’s close friend Vladimir Pyast recounts a journey to visit
Blok at the barracks:

I get off the horse-drawn cab by Samsonyevsky Bridge, because the cabby will
not go as far as the Grenadier Regiment barracks. Then, finally, I find another
one and move through the darkness along the absolutely deserted embankment.
Neither the cabby nor I know where on this embankment the barracks are to be
found. Suddenly, we see a lonely passerby. I ask my cabby to stop so that I can
ask this passerby for directions. But I have to interrupt my question immedi-
ately, exclaiming: “Alexander Alexandrovich! Is it you? Good evening . . .”
While still riding in my cab, I was imagining Blok during his daily walks along
this empty embankment.17

This memorable image of Blok walking along the “empty” embankment is

curiously evocative of the original title of Baudelaire’s Spleen of Paris, which was
Le Promeneur solitaire.18 Pyast depicts Blok as the only inhabitant of the Karpovka
Embankment, thus marking the embankment as the poet’s private space. Im-
portantly, it is precisely such a close, even intimate, relationship with the city
T h e Flu id M ar g i n s 291

that Benjamin sees as key to Baudelaire’s flânerie: “On the Ile Saint-Louis,
Baudelaire felt at home everywhere; he was as perfectly at his ease in the street
or in the quays as he would have been in his own room. To go out into the
Island was in no way to quit his domain. Thus, one met him in slippers, bare-
headed, and dressed in the tunic that served as his work clothes” (243). Benja-
min perceives such behavior to be one of the main achievements of flânerie: the
blurring of the clear-cut divisions between private and public space, between
“inside” and “outside” within the city. He writes of the flâneur: “The city splits
for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it
closes around him as a room” (417). Benjamin continues: “What matters, there-
fore, is neither spatiality per se, nor plasticity per se but only relation and inter-
fusion. There is but one indivisible space. The integuments separating inside
from outside fall away” (423).
Daring, even disturbing combinations and separations of these two
states, inside and outside, can be found in many poems of Blok’s Gorod (City)
cycle. In October 1906, for example, Blok wrote two poems (“Rear Windows”
and “October”) about the desire to grasp outside urban reality from the inside.
The deceptive and hallucinatory sensation of the possibility of transcending
boundaries leads the lyrical narrator to the ultimate act of revolt against the
division between inside and outside: in “October,” the hero jumps through the
window to achieve a new experience of reality:

I opened my window . . . How dull

Is the capital in October [. . .]
Here, here, in front of my eyes,
The star floats and lures,
It swings in my window [. . .]
Now real life will swing
And I’ll acquire wings! . . .
I perceived, perceived my might,
And with a shriek . . .—I am flying!19

The notion of the “real,” unmediated, and rather bleak life in “October”
echoes Blok’s descriptions of Bolshoy street life, and in both instances, the sen-
sation of “real life” is evoked by the radical blurring of public and private,
interior and exterior. Like Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, we might say
that Blok “strives toward elasticity” of the poetic subject’s perception of the
“horrible inside-outside.” For the poet, Bachelard writes, “outside and inside
are both intimate—they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their
hostility.”20 Sometimes this hostility, the envy of the inside for the outside (or
292          

vice versa), acquires radical forms for Blok, who implies in a controversial state-
ment about Gesya Gelfman, one of the assassins of Alexander II, that oppres-
sion of the inside might lead to terror: “Who would dare to accuse Gesya or
some other miserable Jewess who sits in her filthy attic, observing the weather
outside from her window [. . .] and goes to the Catherine Canal Embankment
to throw a bomb at a brilliant, desperate, exhausted by his rule, grand and
passionate man?”21 In this sentimental and idiosyncratic statement, Blok sees
the terrorist’s hostility as a product of the conflict between inside and outside
that leads to the transgressive desire to lash out at the socially powerful.
One way that he transcends such hostility is by reinventing his walking
practice as a time machine of sorts, capable of relocating the subject directly
from the indefinite terror of presentness into the consoling past. Blok seems to
internalize Bachelard’s sense of “the exterior [as] an old intimacy lost in the
shadow of memory”22 as he retrospectively turns the Karpovka into the locus
of his young love for his wife. In 1911, when the idyllic phase of their relation-
ship had been left far behind due to mutual disappointments and infidelities,
Blok wrote in his journal: “Pyast visited me this morning. We strolled by the
Botanical Garden (by the barracks and memories). [. . .] The charm of the twi-
light sky, many airplanes above, the foreignness [zagranitsa] of the Karpovka
neighborhood, the sadness of memories by the botanical garden and by the
barracks, our windows—with Lyuba.”23 Walking the river becomes for the
poet a way to reactivate his memory, to reenter the seemingly unreachable, en-
capsulated space behind the windows of his young love. Karpovka, paradoxically,
turns into the “interior” space of Blok’s memorializing homage. The designa-
tion of the outskirts of the city as a locus that is both agent and object of the me-
morializing gaze is similar to the strategy chosen by Baudelaire in his untitled
fragment “Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville . . .”:
I have not forgotten our white cottage,
Small but peaceful, near the city,
Its plaster Pomona, its old Venus,
Hiding their bare limbs in a stunted grove.
In the evening streamed down the radiant sun,
That great eye which stares from the inquisitive sky.
From behind the window that scattered its bright rays
It seemed to gaze upon our long, quiet dinners,
Spreading wide its candle-like reflections
On the frugal table-cloth and the serge curtains.24

Both poets revisit their younger—allegedly more innocent—selves at the out-

skirts of their cities.25 Both desire to peep into their pasts that hide from the
T h e Flu id M ar g i n s 293

nostalgic gaze behind the windows. These pasts differ essentially from the
temptations of the present by this very impulse: to hide and to be discrete and
unattainable to a voyeur. Blok’s old, no longer attainable, love for Lyuba is not
unlike Baudelaire’s “old Venus, hiding [. . .] bare limbs in a stunted grove.” The
poets experience their past to be as remote from their present as the quiet oases
of Neuilly-sur-Seine (where Baudelaire spent his youth) and of the Karpovka
Embankment are remote from the crowds of the center of Paris and Petersburg.
The nostalgic homage to the “old Venus” along the Karpovka is markedly
different from the other intimate strolls taken by Blok on the Petersburg Side,
many of which are marked by transgressive eroticism. For Blok, who once
wrote “There is still enough women and wine. [. . .] Petersburg is the most
terrifying, evocative, and invigorating of all the European cities,” knowledge of
his city was often carnal and had many facets.26 One reflection of Blok’s erotic
flânerie can be seen in the description of the enclosed, claustrophobic alleys
around the Karpovka in the 1904 poem “Illusion” (“Obman”):
In the empty back alley the waters of Spring
Run and mumble. The girl is laughing:
The red dwarf won’t let her pass
[. . .]
The reflection lures and scares the girl,
A lonely streetlight blinked from afar.
The red sun hid behind the building.
Laughter. Splashes. Water drops.
Burning smell of factories.27
Another instance is found in “Islands” (“Na ostrovakh,”1909), which describes
the open space of Elagin Island:
And again: the columns covered with snow,
Elagin Bridge and two lights.
And the voice of the woman in love,
And the sand is crackling, and the horse is snorting
[. . .]
With the regularity of a geometrician
I figure out every time, without any words:
Bridges, chapel, harshness of the wind,
Empty low islands.28
While the first poem shows enclosed urban space through the claustrophobic
image of transgressive sexuality, the second gives the sensation of the vastness
and openness of the islands by describing the love game in an open carriage
that speeds through the empty islands and over frozen bridges linking them.
294          

Blok’s return to the memories of the Karpovka saves the poet from both sen-
sual agoraphobia and claustrophobia,29 and his special reconstruction of the
past protects him from the temptations and perils of the present. Blok’s roles
within the space of the outskirts of Petersburg are many: he observes the “real
life” of the streets, mediates it in his writing, and participates in it, even co-
creates it, through contacts with the female flâneurs—the numerous street
walkers who frequented that part of the city and Blok’s female acquaintances
whom he would bring to the islands.

Bl o k a nd t he “ Tra nspa rent ” H o u s es

of t he K a r povka

“On the surface of being, in that region where being wants to be both visible
and hidden,” writes Bachelard, “the movements of opening and closing are so
numerous, so frequently inverted, and so charged with hesitation, that we
could conclude on the following formula: man is a half-open being.”30 Blok was
a half-open being who lived during an epoch that strived for new openness. In the
observant and poignant memoirs of the artist Vladimir Milashevsky, we read
about a poetry reading in 1913 at which Pyast was reciting his friend’s poetry.
Though Blok was standing next to the stage, nobody noticed him with his red-
dish hair and sunburned face. The crowd desired the Alexander Blok from the
thousands of postcards, writes Milashevsky: “That picture on the photograph
was overexposed [ perederzhannaia]! Black curls, sensual lips, half-closed eyelids:
the demon from our opera expectations!”31 Hiding behind an “opera” mask
might have been a real ordeal for a poet living during the reign of an aesthetics of
peeping, as Milashevsky wittily described the era. To illustrate what he meant, he
evoked the male practice of climbing to the upper floor of the horse-drawn
tram in the hope of catching a glimpse of the intimate life of the residents:
“Usually one would see dull poor apartments with some old lady knitting her
sock. [. . .] But sometimes your gaze meets a young woman who decided to un-
dress right at the moment when your coach was passing by her window.”32
The epoch’s obsessive desire to transgress boundaries between private and
public, together with Blok’s quest to transcend and connect the “interior” and
“exterior” of his city, inspired the main conceptual strategy of my Karpovka
pathway on the Mapping Petersburg Web site. Blok’s experience of the Karpovka
area, immediate and retrospective, put his “half-open being” into contact with
a “half-open,” hybrid space. Following my pathway, the virtual traveler as city
dweller can see through the walls of the houses on the Karpovka Embankment,
T h e Flu id M ar g i n s 295

thus going beyond the surface. This device of seeing through the walls corresponds
to the realities of Blok’s life. For example, walking by the house of Maria Sa-
vina, which was designed by M. F. Geisler, the important art nouveau Peters-
burg architect, Blok could easily see or imagine the prima donna of the Impe-
rial Alexandrinsky Theater and the main rival of Blok’s close friend and muse
Vera Komissarzhevskaya, a remarkable innovator of the modernist theater.
Stopping by the small pink house next to Savina’s whimsical mansion, Blok
could think of the many poets and artists he knew who resided there at the be-
ginning of the century: poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, artist and musician Mikhail
Matyushin, poet, and artist Elena Guro. Anastasia Vyaltseva, the famous singer
of Russian gypsy songs, a genre that influenced Blok’s poetry, also lived on the
Karpovka Embankment. Hence, Blok’s walks by the river inspired a pano-
ramic yet penetrating vision of the artistic life of Petersburg of the time. The
poet turns into a flâneur-collector whose method is “receiving things into [his]
space” and allowing them “to step into his life.”33
One of the richest historical and cultural locales along the Karpovka River
was the furniture factory of Fyodor Fyodorovich Meltser (1886–1918), a promi-
nent brick building on the corner of Kamennoostrovsky Avenue and the Kar-
povka Embankment. For the purposes of my essay and pathway this factory
building serves as a telling example of the inside/outside correlation in the re-
lationship between the Karpovka flâneur and the buildings of the river em-
bankment. The building from the outside was an important landmark (perhaps
watermark would be a more precise term here). It marked the crossing of two as-
pects of the Petersburg Side: the energetic flow of Kamennoostrovsky Avenue,
with its fashionable crowd, and the languid flow of the Karpovka, along whose
embankment a flâneur would look for refuge from the onslaught of glamour.
The building, one of Petersburg’s leading furniture factories, was erected in
1884 by V. V. Shaub, a Petersburg architect who was an important exponent of
style moderne. After 1904 it was co-owned by the brothers Fyodor and Robert
Meltser. It employed approximately two hundred workers, whose products
contributed to the Pan-Russian and World expositions. Among Meltser clients
were several leading families, including the Romanov royal family, the manu-
facturers Nobels, and the artistic clan of Alexander Benois, as well as the fa-
mous ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya. Robert Meltser was a patron of the im-
portant artist of the Petersburg avant-garde Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who lived
in the Meltser family residence adjacent to the factory.
The Meltser factory serves as the embodiment of several layers of urban
life: it gives the Karpovka Embankment an element of industrial outskirts (rabo-
chaia okraina), a topographic entity that Julie Buckler aptly distinguishes from
296          

the elegant and fashionable “environs” (okrestnosti ) of the islands. By “industrial

outskirts,” we are to understand “marginal industrial areas [. . .] in their re-
lationship to the outmost border of the city and thus to near-exclusion, even
though the palace-parks actually lie at a greater physical distance from the
center.”34 For Blok, the Meltser factory and the factories of the Vyborg Side,
which he would have seen from his windows in the barracks, were the “factory
layer” of that part of the city. Both Bely and Blok experienced ambivalent feel-
ings of repulsion and attraction toward this “layer”: it “lured and scared” them
at the same time. Bely exclaims in Petersburg: “The inhabitants of the islands
startle you. [. . .] And as for us, here’s what we’ll say: oh, Russian people! Don’t
let the crowd of shadows in from the islands! [. . .] Black and damp bridges are
already thrown across the waters of Lethe. If only they could be dismantled.”35
(It is not clear whether the narrator’s “you” is self-inclusive.) For Gorodetsky,
Blok’s early poetry is inseparably linked to the “spirit of the outskirts”: “The
whole second cycle of the poems of the Beautiful Lady, which builds an antith-
esis to the original image of the Lady, belongs to the factory outskirts. The huge
building of the barracks on the Karpovka and Nevka rivers is surrounded on all
sides by factories and workers. The closest wooden bridge gives two views—
one of the spectacular city, another of the factories.”36
In addition to serving as an emblem of Karpovka’s “factory text,” Meltser
furniture should be read as an intrinsic part of the material culture of Peters-
burg modernism. This factory provided inhabitants of modernist Petersburg
with the “stage sets” for their lifestyles. The Meltser factory screen in Japanese
style shown on my Karpovka virtual pathway37 brings to mind the interior
room of Bely’s Sofia Likhutina, the whimsical, frivolous, and fashionable hero-
ine of Petersburg: “Ah, Sofia Petrovna! [. . .] On the walls were Japanese fans,
lace, tiny pendants, and bows, and on the lamps from satin shades fluttered
wings of cotton fabric like tropical butterflies. [. . .] Sofia Petrovna Likhutina
had hung small Japanese landscapes, all of them depicting a view of Mt. Fuji-
yama. The landscapes had no perspectives. And the rooms, jam-packed with
divans, armchairs, sofas, fans, and live chrysanthemums, had no perspective
either.”38 This congeniality of taste and style has special meaning, because So-
fia Petrovna’s prototype was Lyubov Dmitrievna—Blok’s wife, who had been
the object of Bely’s passion, reminding us how densely interwoven were the
threads of the Petersburg modernist milieu.
The very location of the Meltser factory symbolizes the eclectic character of
Petersburg modernity: the factory “layer” at this point assails and, using Bely’s
phrase, “startles” fashionable Kamennoostrovsky. And if we imagine looking
T h e Flu id M ar g i n s 297

behind the surface of the factory’s brick walls, we discover other ways in which
the factory interacted with Petersburg’s modernist world: the factory owner was
a renowned patron of the arts, the factory’s products were popular among the
glitterati of the contemporary art scene, and these products even penetrated
works of modernist literature. Such discoveries reveal the interconnections of
Petersburg modernism and its web of links to the banks of the Karpovka.

E pilog ue : The K a r povka a s Vi g n et t e,

o r th e Paint e r of Mode r n Life o n t he Ou t s ki r t s
of Hist or y

Yet another trajectory of creative flânerie along the Karpovka River com-
ments on the postrevolutionary fata of Petersburg modernism and helps to draw
together connections over time. Our protagonist here is the celebrated etcher
Dmitry Isidorovich Mitrokhin (1883–1973). His fate, like that of many Russian
artists who managed to adjust to the vortexlike twentieth century, was ruled by
contradictory vectors. The accent here is on Mitrokhin’s fascination with the
Karpovka River in the late 1920s.
Mitrokhin belonged to the younger generation of the World of Art group,
whose epoch and milieu defined the artist’s understanding of “his modernity.”
It is significant that he coined this personal idiom in an article about Con-
stantin Guys, the protagonist and muse of Baudelaire’s seminal article “The
Painter of Modern Life.” “Whatever [the artist] chooses to depict is so amazing
and striking in its mastery,” writes Mitrokhin, “that Charles Baudelaire, the
artist’s friend, in admiration, defined Guys in the essay as the most powerful de-
picter of his modernity.”39 For Baudelaire, the choice of Guys, not a major art-
ist by any system of ranking, was a sign of Baudelaire’s interest in the fleeting
and changing artistic phenomena that accorded with his understanding of
modernity. The historian of art and fashion Valerie Steel comments: “Baude-
laire repeatedly took the tone of art critic who has provocatively chosen to em-
phasize not the great paintings of the past but the work of admittedly lesser art-
ists, [. . .] which was, however, valuable for its portrayal of modern life. One of
the reasons Baudelaire praised Guys so strongly was because he regarded him
as being simultaneously a dandy, a flâneur, and an artist—a participant, an ob-
server, and a creator of the world of fashion.”40
Mitrokhin’s interest in the meaning of Guys’s works and Baudelaire’s read-
ing of them was lasting and symptomatic: already in the late 1920s, interest in
298          

the seemingly minor French artist would become an important thread uniting a
marginal aesthetic group in Leningrad, including Mitrokhin, Mikhail Kuzmin,
Yury Yurkun, Olga Arbenina-Gildenbrandt, and others. Here, Guys’s fleeting
urban impressions were interpreted as the opposite of ideological densification,
the thickening “sediment” of Soviet Leningrad.41
Aesthetic figures and preoccupations with the marginal attracted Mitro-
khin. Together with his peers Konstantin Somov, Lev Bakst, Alexander Benois,
Alexander Golovin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Evgeny Lansere, Sergey Chekho-
nin, and Nikolay Feofilaktov, Mitrokhin revolutionized Russian book art. But
even in this rather specific, if not marginal, area of the arts, he found a more
specialized niche of his own. Kuzmin, whose books Mitrokhin illustrated lov-
ingly, writes: “Mitrokhin’s power lies in end-pieces, covers, ex-libris, illumina-
tions, flyleaves, all kinds of vignettes, where graphic art inseparably borders on
the book material per se.”42 There, literally on the margins of texts by Vasily
Rozanov and Konstantin Balmont, Marina Tsvetaeva and Kuzmin, and Ovid
and Longus, Mitrokhin created a delicate world derived from fairy-tale im-
agery and inspired by the ornamental shapes of nature. “Mitrokhin is a fairy-
tale-teller!” Kuzmin exclaimed. “The lyrical content of nature, sometimes not
even nature as such, but its ornamental lines—this is what attracts Mitrokhin
the most.”43
His penchant for the ornamental lines of nature was related, according to
another critic of Mitrokhin, to certain limitations of his gift: allegedly, he pre-
ferred landscapes to the depiction of people; erotic subjects in his depiction
lacked passion.44 In this context, Mitrokhin’s illustrations for Longus’s bucolic
novel Daphnis and Chloe were uniquely adequate to his gift: the tone of the novel’s
erotica is muffled and submerged in the world of nature, with young lovers
existing as if alone in the rarified sweetness of the natural world.
After the 1917 October Revolution, Mitrokhin, who held a high curatorial
position in the Russian Museum, began to look feverishly for more ideologi-
cally appropriate subjects. In 1920 he illustrated Kuzmin’s translation of H. De
Régnier’s “Seven Amorous Portraits”; the long poem “In China” by Nikolay
Gumilev (who would be executed by the new regime only a year later); and a
brochure, “The Second Congress of the Communist International.” Even
more politically correct subjects began to appear in his work later. Yet there
was one important exception at the end of the 1920s, when Mitrokhin created
a series of sketches of the back streets of the Petersburg Side, with special atten-
tion to the banks of the Karpovka River.45
In his letters from the time, Mitrokhin complained about his marginal posi-
tion in the new cultural process:
T h e Flu id M ar g i n s 299

D. I. Mitrokhin, On Karpovka, 1939 (Yuri Rusakov, Dmitry Isidorovich

Mitrokhin, 1966)

They’ve just opened a “World of Art” exhibition here. This attempt is fruitless
and joyless. The reaction to the opening—complete silence and indifference.
(1924)

I am sending many of my sketches to the exhibition of polygraphy in Moscow.

But what if nobody needs them there! (1927)

Haven’t you heard any rumors about the exhibition of my sketches? I am

afraid—it’s not likely to happen this year, since nobody is interested in it.
(1927)46
300          

In this context, his interest in the “out of the way place” (zakholust’ie) of the Kar-
povka acquires new meaning. In describing his sketching process, Mitrokhin
writes that he “began making the landscape sketches in the streets. There are
many beautiful, godforsaken places on the Karpovka. [. . .] I’d like to make
whole series of drawings!” (1923)47
Mitrokhin’s devoted biographer Yury Rusakov muses:
The center of the former capital did not attract him much: his seemingly strange
predilection can probably be explained by the fact that living on the Petrograd
Side and continually strolling amid its scenery, Mitrokhin learned to love the
place, with its quite individual character. Thanks to the frenetic construction at
the start of the twentieth century, interrupted by World War I and the events of
the 1917 Revolution, the Petrograd Side was, at the time, a straggling, architec-
turally disorganized conglomeration of large houses with blank fireproof end
walls, interspersed, here and there, by plots of wasteland with mighty, old trees
still growing in them, endless fences, and small wooden houses that kept stand-
ing by a sort of miracle. This setting, unique to this part of the former capital,
charmed Mitrokhin by the pathetic contrast between the surviving patches of
countryside and the great city suddenly stopped in its stride.48

Mitrokhin’s position within the World of Art group was literally on the
margin of the book, but within the cultural process of the historical moment, he
was at the very center, participating in dozens of exhibitions, publications, and
other exciting projects. New Soviet aesthetic sensibilities pushed Mitrokhin to
the edge; he needed a topographical locale that could adequately reflect this
position. The Karpovka was perfect. On the one hand, the river was connected
to the acme of Petersburg modernism, and it embodied Mitrokhin’s nostalgia
for the epoch, when Blok, Matyushin, Kuzmin, Mayakovsky, Vyaltseva, and
others would stroll along its banks—an epoch when the river was understood
as a whimsical and incomplete vignette in contrast to the overwritten urban
text of the center. On the other hand, the Karpovka came to signify for Mitro-
khin the desolation and emptiness that surrounded the practitioners of Peters-
burg modernism at the end of the 1920s.
In less politicized terms, the charms of the Karpovka, seen before as a
seductive pastoral virgin, were very attractive to the artist of Daphnis and Chloe.
For Mitrokhin, as for Blok before him, the Karpovka was a bucolic locale of
longing that was associated with the desire to freeze time. For Blok, it was the
place where he and Lyuba would forever be young together; for Mitrokhin, it
was where his artist friends would be flâneurs, where they would create and de-
bate, not yet stifled by the new century. To borrow Mitrokhin’s praise of Guys,
the Karpovka was a place of “their modernity”—intimate, self-contradictory,
T h e Flu id M ar g i n s 301

“enveloping,” “soaking,” and inspiring. The quest for new urban meaning
along the banks of the Karpovka River became an intimate urban practice
aimed at blurring both the temporal boundaries between past and present and
the spatial ones between interior and exterior. By means of such strolls, an artist
could construe the Karpovka Embankment as a time capsule, where otherwise
unreachable areas of memory were conserved, remaining exempt from the noise
of time. Juxtaposed to the swarming communality and lack of meaning of the more
central urban areas, which Petersburg modernists perceived as repulsive and
overwritten, the marginal Karpovka might be seen as a locale with the potential
for flexible meaning: walks along its embankment assisted in healing the rupture
between the personal past and present.
All three creators considered here saw the Karpovka and its neighborhoods
as a refuge from the perils of the center (both topographical and cultural). This
threatening influence was expressed as aggressively isolating social difference
in the case of Grebyonka, as lacking meaning and authenticity in the case of
Blok, and as negation of Petersburg’s past by the Leningrad present in the case
of Mitrokhin. Designed as two mutually enriching components, this essay and
the virtual pathway49 aim to remap the experience of creative walking alongside
Karpovka’s unhurried flow: for the artists, the river not only functioned as in-
spiration and as a model cityscape, it also embodied the continuous flow of
personal modernity, with its specific network of memories and associations dif-
ferentiated from the pressures of the homogenizing, and at times frightening,
flow of the central avenues. Such a reconstruction of part of the city’s connec-
tive tissue includes the protagonists’ vision of the past as well as its inscription
into the disruptive dynamics of urban modernity.


1. Charles Baudelaire, “Heroism of Modern Life,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on
Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Chavet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981),
104–7.
2. Bely’s “rhyming” notion of a “viscous and slowly flowing sediment” (tekushchaia
gushcha) is pervasive in the text; for example, in the chapter “The Last Judgment” (Sirin
edition of Petersburg), the participle flowing is repeated four times in relation to Nikolay
Ableukhov’s intense expectation of the terrorist bomb explosion. In such a context, flow-
ing turns into a sort of eschatological limitation, rather than evoking the Baudelarian
idea of free and limitless movement/sensation. This kind of flowing is closer to
Benjamin’s later reconceptualization of Baudelaire’s crowd. Graeme Gilloch writes: “In
Benjamin’s later writings on Baudelaire and Paris, an increasing emphasis is given to the
dehumanizing tendencies at work in the crowd: toward conformity, uniformity, ano-
nymity and passivity. The metropolitan crowd emerges in a new light: namely as a
302          

threatening, undifferentiated mass. . . . The dreaming collectivity has become the night-
mare of the mob” (Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City
[Cambridge: Polity, 1996], 146–48).
3. Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 178, 179.
4. On the grammar of a city-text, see Julie Buckler’s introduction of Vitruvian
urban “syntax” into the text of Petersburg eclecticism (Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text
and Cityshape [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005], 41).
5. Alexander Blok, Zapisnye knizhki, 1901–1920 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia litera-
tura, 1965), 298. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.
6. I refer to the Side as “Petersburg” when describing events before 1914 and as
“Petrograd” when describing events after 1914, the year the city changed its name.
7. Alexander Blok, Dnevnik, in Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 7 (Moscow: Khu-
dozhestvennaia literatura, 1963), 131.
8. Vladimir Milashevsky describes Bolshoy Avenue as a locale known for prostitu-
tion in his Petersburg Side “travelogue” titled “Togda, v Peterburge, v Petrograde”:
“Bolshoy Avenue. Here one meets mysterious girls ‘whom no one knows,’ so covered
with makeup that one can’t distinguish their actual facial features. . . . All of them wear
a boa of feathers as some kind of uniform” (Milashevsky, Vchera, pozavchera . . . Vospomi-
naniia khudozhnika [Moscow: Kniga, 1989], 23). Curiously, the prostitutes in this episode
imitate their famous colleague from Blok’s poem “The Lady Whom No One Knows”
(“Neznakomka”).
9. Blok insistently studied and described the lower depths of Petersburg through
flânerie: “The evening strolls (that I took up again after a long break) to the gloomy
locales, bleak windows with curtains. . . . The girl walks breathing heavily: it must be
tuberculosis. This world is terrifying”(Zapisnye knizhki, 114).
10. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers
(New York: Knopf, 1984), 146.
11. Adrian Wanner, Baudelaire in Russia (Gainesville: University of Florida Press,
1996), 192.
12. On the early history of the northern islands of Petersburg, see V. A. Vityazeva,
Nevskie ostrova: Elagin, Krestovsky, Kamenny (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1986).
13. Evgeny Grebyonka, “Petersburgskaya storona,” in Fiziologiia Peterburga, ed.
Nikolay Nekrasov (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 72–73. Subsequent references to this work
will appear parenthetically in the text.
14. Antonina Kalyuzhnaya, Petersburgskaya storona (Petersburg: Ostrov, 2007), 185.
15. Osip Mandelshtam, “Egyptian Stamp,” in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans.
Clarence Brown (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 140.
16. Sergey Gorodetsky, “Iz vospominanii ob Aleksandre Bloke,” in Ia luchshei doli ne
iskal: Sud’ba Aleksandra Bloka v pis’makh, dnevnikakh, vospominaniiakh, ed. P. Enisherlov (Mos-
cow: Pravda, 1988), 176.
17. Vladimir Pyast, “Vospominaniia o Bloke,” in Ia luchshei, 184.
18. Benjamin reports that “the title originally planned for Les Fleurs du mal was Les
Limbes [Limbo] . . . , and for Le Spleen de Paris it was Le Promeneur solitaire” (Walter Benja-
min, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge,
T h e Flu id M a r g i n s 303

MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999], 235). Subsequent references to
this work will appear parenthetically in the text.
19. Blok, “V oktiabre,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:193.
20. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion Press, 1964), 217.
21. Blok, Dnevnik, 73.
22. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 182.
23. Ibid., 81. The phrase zagranitsa na Karpovke needs explanation: it both echoes
Grebyonka’s observation of the “otherness” of this area and connotes the new architec-
tural realities of the belle époque Petrograd Side, with its westernized shapes. In 1902,
the architect V. S. Karpovich wrote: “The architectural firm of Shaub reigns on the Pe-
tersburg Side, giving birth to Germanic culture. For example, the ‘House of Gorbov’ (10
Mira Street) is decorated in a modernized Germanic style with multiple baroque shapes
and artistic features” (quoted in Kalyuzhnaya, Petersburgskaya storona, 124). We observe
here an interesting semiotic shift and complication: zagranitsa now relates both to social
topography and to architecture.
24. Charles Baudelaire, Piece 99, Fleurs du Mal, 1861 ed., trans. William Aggeler,
The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954), 94.
25. Before their marriage, Blok and Mendeleeva rented a room for their meetings
at 10 Serpukhovskaya Street. Though the purpose of their meetings was not the con-
summation of their love but rather a discursive union, they could not stand the idea that
others would treat them as clandestine lovers (A. Aleksandrov, Blok v Peterburge-Petrograde
[Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1987], 73).
26. Blok, Dnevnik, 72.
27. Blok, “Obman,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:146.
28. Blok, “Na ostrovakh,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 3:20.
29. Blok’s diary abounds in descriptions of his erotic flânerie of the most poignant
kind such as in this instance: “The woman acrobat exits—I implore her to go with me.
We are flying, and the night is yawning. I cannot control myself. The whole night she
covers her mouth with her hand. I tear her lace and her silk, in my crude hands and in
her sharp heels some force and some mystery lie hidden. I spend hours with her: pain-
fully and fruitlessly. After that she disappears into the alley” (Zapisnye knizhki, 77). For a
Benjaminian analysis of Baudelaire’s and Blok’s poetic methods of erotic flânerie, see
Gerald Pirog, “Melancholy Illuminations: Mourning Becomes Blok’s Stranger,” Croatian
and Serbian, Czech and Slovak, Polish Literature 50 (2001): 103–23.
30. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 222.
31. Milashevsky, Vchera, pozavchera . . . , 81.
32. Ibid., 34.
33. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 206. Because of Blok’s penchant for urban mediation,
he has become a protagonist of some of the essays in this volume: besides the essay on
his play The Puppet Show, those about the tram and especially about Blok’s death and
funeral.
34. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 158.
35. Bely, Petersburg, 12–13. For a discussion of bridges in Petersburg, see Luke
Stratton’s essay in this volume.
36. Gorodetsky, “Iz vospominanii,” 176.
304          

37. See my Karpovka itinerary in Mapping Petersburg.

38. Bely, Petersburg, 39.
39. Dmitry Mitrokhin, “K. Guys,” in Kniga o Mitrokhine: Stat’i, pis’ma, vospominaniia
(Moscow: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1986), 38. The ambiguous use of the pronoun “his” in
this passage allows the reader to understand that Mitrokhin is ascribing “his modernity”
either to Baudelaire or to Guys.
40. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Paris: Berg Publishers, 1998), 90.
41. Olga Gildenbrandt-Arbenina, Devochka, katiashchaia serso (Moscow: Molodaia
Gvardiia, 2007), 83.
42. Mikhail Kuzmin, “D. I. Mitrokhin,” in Kniga o Mitrokhine, 351.
43. Ibid.
44. Vsevolod Voinov, “D. I. Mitrokhin,” in Kniga o Mitrokhine, 354.
45. Mitrokhin was not the only Leningrad artist of the time attracted to the subject
of topographic and social margins. See, e.g., N. I. Dormidontov, Okraina Leningrada.
Muzykanty (1928); S. A. Pavlov, Letniaia noch’ za Narvskoi zastavoi (1923); and Vasileostrovskii
peizazh (1923). Published on CD-Rom Tri Veka Peterburga (Saint Petersburg, 2004).
46. Dmitry Mitrokhin, Pis’ma, in Kniga o Mitrokhine, 151.
47. Ibid., 140.
48. Yury Rusakov, Dmitry Isidorovich Mitrokhin (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1966), 90.
49. See my Karpovka itinerary in Mapping Petersburg.
 12
The Voices of Silence
The Death and Funeral of Alexander Blok

           -   

The summer of 1921 in Petrograd was marked by death: the slow decline and
death of Alexander Blok on August 7, 1921; the arrest (on August 3) and exe-
cution (on August 24) of the poet Nikolay Gumilev by the Cheka (secret po-
lice); and the suicide of the author and translator Anastasia Chebotarevskaya,
wife of writer Fyodor Sologub, who drowned herself in the Neva on September
23 in despair over the vacillation of the authorities in issuing them emigration
visas. Together these deaths—characterized both by slow decline and sudden
violence—formed the central trope in the myth of the dying Petersburg. Sev-
eral decades later, the writer Nina Berberova, a then relatively unknown figure,
described the period as “a black page in Russian poetry”—an end of an era,
through whose peripeties one lived with an “extraordinary intensity” as if
“at the edge of an abyss.”1 For many, Blok’s funeral was the last time they
would be together. Later, many emigrated; some perished, victims of political
persecution; and others were transformed into the new Soviet intelligentsia. As
Petrograd experienced the transition from revolution and civil war to the social
reconstruction and political consolidation of the New Economic Policy in the
spring of 1921, the literary intelligentsia tried to make sense of this cultural and
historical threshold. Blok’s funeral provided an opportunity to express the anx-
iety of the time through the communal rituals and narratives of death. In the
public imagination, the Petersburg of 1921—“that Petersburg, where we buried

305
306         -  

Blok and where we could not bury Gumilev”2—became the threshold between
the death of old Petersburg and the birth of the new Soviet Petrograd.
Rites of passage order space and time, demarcate the sacred from the pro-
fane, and create a counterpoint to the banality of the everyday. The symbolic
construction of a culture is revealed against the background of death. As the
literary scholar Alan Friedman notes, “Artifacts of death—rituals of dying and
funeral, graveyards and tombs, wills and death certificates, the corpse itself—
are as much communal constructs, dramatic and narrative performance, as are
the texts that contain them.”3 This essay and the accompanying Web itinerary
reconstruct the death and funeral of Alexander Blok. They are developed
around key moments that structure the reminiscences of his contemporaries:
learning about Blok’s death; viewing the corpse in the intimate setting of his
apartment; taking part in the funeral procession that moved from Blok’s home
on 57 Ofitserskaya Street to Smolensk Cemetery on Vasilievsky Island; and
finally, the burial, remarkable for the fact that “no one spoke at the grave.”4
Indeed, silence is intimately connected to both the poet and the city and be-
comes the dominant motif associated with Blok’s death and with the year 1921.
This silence is expressed through allusions to the silence of the press about
Blok’s death, the silence of the emaciated city, the transformation of Blok’s
dead body, and perhaps most prominently, the silence of the funeral itself. The
function and meaning of ritual silence provides an illuminating contrast against
the background noises of early twentieth-century Petersburg: the streetcar’s
prattle and the rhythmic sewing of the Singer sewing machine, the chaotic
sound of the slaughterhouse and the explosion of a terrorist’s bomb.5

Living in a Dying C i t y:
T h e Ar t of Life a nd t he Li fe o f A r t

Blok died in the summer of 1921, in the aftermath of the Civil War—a period of
political crisis and economic scarcity that famously transformed both the topo-
graphical and the textual identity of the city. After the Bolshevik revolution, the
industrial capital of Russia was emptied of industry and people; it had been
looted, vandalized, and disrupted by frequent strikes.6 News of the nationwide
famine, which had reached epidemic proportions, dominated the press, and in
the winter, as Petrograd froze because of an unprecedented fuel crisis, the city’s
inhabitants burned picture frames, furniture, and books to stay warm.7 By the
spring, the Civil War had come to a conclusion, and the inauguration of the
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n ce 307

New Economic Policy began to transform the material conditions and everyday
life of the city’s inhabitants: small private restaurants and businesses began to
open, and signs advertising commercial goods began to appear on the streets.
Indeed, as NEP began to change the political, economic, and cultural climate
of Petrograd, the Civil War years crystallized into the central trope of the myth
of Petersburg and its death.
As Polina Barskova suggests, the real experience of crisis merged with the
eschatological Petersburg text to produce new narratives concerned with the
spectacle of the agonizing, slow death of old Petersburg.8 Indeed, important
works of the preservationist movement, like Nikolay Antsiferov’s The Soul of
Petersburg and Erikh Gollerbakh’s City of Muses, described the physical state of
the post–Civil War city as “‘graveyards’ inhospitable to new life.”9 Those con-
nected to literary life often fared better than the majority of the population. In
a world of scarcity—where shortages of food, firewood, and even paper were
common—the intelligentsia, through the patronage of Maksim Gorky, Anatoly
Lunacharsky, and other influential cultural figures, had access to occasionally
heated living space and food rations through the newly established cultural
institutions—the House of Arts, the House of Writers, and the House of Schol-
ars. Despite difficult material conditions, and perhaps because of them, some
described literary life in Civil War Petrograd as having retained an apocalyptic
vitality.10 Olga Forsh noted in Ship of Fools (Sumasshedshii korabl’ ), her fictional-
ized memoir of life in the House of Arts, that Petersburg cultural life resembled
grapevines that flourish on the edge of a volcano:
Everyone lived in that house as if on the edge of death. The generals approached
from all fronts, and hunger began to approach the limits [of the bearable].
People invented snares for crows, and thankfully in the book The Brest Negotiations
people read that there was a precedent, and that the German military men had
already eaten crows. Because of the feelings of instability and tension, regular
weekdays no longer existed, and life itself came to be not this or that gathering of
facts but only the art of surviving these facts. Not the customary norms in the
relationship between labor and leisure time, not the necessity of wearing these
or other masks, called for by the circumstance or by the hierarchy of the intelli-
gentsia values to which one had become accustomed [—none of this existed
any longer].
Alongside this, it was indeed in these years that, just as the richest grapes
flourished on the edge of a volcano, people flourished in their own best colors.
Everyone was a hero. Everyone was a creator. Some created new norms of
sociability, some—books, some—entire schools, some—boots from the coarse
cloth of a card table.11
308         -  

Despite his cultural stature, Blok’s circumstances and health had deteri-
orated significantly during the Civil War period. A new domestic arrangement
exacerbated the long-existing tension between Blok’s mother and his wife; his
health gradually declined and in the spring of 1921 took a sharp turn for the
worse. 12 The poet’s last public performances—in Petrograd on April 25 and in
Moscow in early May—which he was compelled to give for financial reasons,
became part of the spectacle of his slow death. Members of the audience re-
marked on the macabre, funereal atmosphere: Evgeny Zamyatin described
Blok’s Petrograd reading as his “wake.” In Moscow the young poet Mikhail
Struve announced to the audience that Blok was already dead, and Blok, back-
stage, famously remarked to Korney Chukovsky that Struve was right. Vladi-
mir Mayakovsky, who attended Blok’s reading in Moscow, tied his demise to
his final public performance: “I listened to him in May in Moscow: in the half-
empty hall, silent as a cemetery, he quietly and sadly read lines about gypsy
singing, about love, about the beautiful lady—there was no way forward. Only
death. And it came.”13 Indeed, in the public imagination, Blok’s literary death
not only preceded his biological death but actually made it inevitable. After
June, Blok spent most of his time in his apartment in alternating stages of rage
and delirium.14
Contributing to the diffuse mythology that developed around Blok’s slow,
agonizing death was the fact that its specific cause was uncertain—some
blamed heart problems, depression, or venereal disease, while others attributed
his death to material deprivation. Many cited transcendent forces: Blok had
suffocated in postrevolutionary conditions; he had become deaf to the music of
History. Superimposed over material and biological explanations was a mytho-
historical meaning. As Vladislav Khodasevich wrote in Necropolis,

Isn’t it strange: Blok was dying for several months, in front of everyone’s eyes,
the doctors treated him—and no one named or could name his illness. It began
with a pain in the legs. Then some spoke of a weakness of the heart. Before
dying he suffered immensely. But what did he die of ? Unknown. He died some-
how “in general,” because he was sick completely, because he could no longer
live. He died of death.15

In a cultural context that had, for most of Blok’s public career, conflated his
private person with his public persona, his death inevitably became a historical
and literary fact,16 an essential component of the mythologized and eulogized
demise of Petersburg. Ekaterina Yudina suggests that, in the 1920s, the Peters-
burg myth evolved. The city was no longer revered for the neoclassicism of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead both those who emigrated and
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n ce 309

those who remained created “an idealized St. Petersburg of their dreams” into
which they could escape from the reality of Leningrad.17 Blok became the
iconic poet-martyr of this new “old Petersburg,” the latest incarnation of the
city’s mythology.

“ This C a nnot Be Forgi ven . . .”

Blok died on a hot August Sunday. Despite his ambivalence towards traditional
religion, his wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna, insisted on a Russian Orthodox service:
the body was laid out on a table in the home of the deceased for three days, and
visitors attended the nightly services.18 The funeral took place on the fourth
day, August 10, 1921—Blok’s coffin was carried six kilometers in a procession
from the poet’s home to Smolensk Cemetery and buried after a final service for
the dead. Samuil Alyansky, Blok’s close friend and founder of the symbolist
publishing house Alkonost, made most of the arrangements for the funeral.19
The young poet Evgeniya Knipovich, who had become a close friend of the
family in the last years of Blok’s life, helped him.20
Yury Annenkov recalled that the Soviet press was conspicuously silent:
“How did the official press respond to the death of Alexander Blok? The follow-
ing notice appeared in Pravda August 9, 1921: ‘Yesterday morning the poet Alex-
ander Blok passed away.’ That’s all. And not a word more.”21 Small posters
pasted on the walls of the House of Arts, House of Scholars, House of Writers,
the Bolshoy Drama Theater, and the publishing houses World Literature and
Alkonost announced Blok’s death.22 By the time permission was received for
Blok’s funeral on August 9, it was too late to place an announcement in the
newspapers; Alyansky recruited university students to post a thousand fliers
that informed the public that Blok’s body would be buried at Smolensk Ceme-
tery on Wednesday, August 10, at ten o’clock in the morning.23
Yet even before the posters appeared on the streets of Petrograd, news of
the death had reached many close friends, spread through the city by those few
who—often by chance—happened upon the news. Andrey Bely received no-
tice of Blok’s death from the writer R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, with whom he was
staying at the time in Tsarskoe Selo.24 Ivanov-Razumnik had come from a
presentation on Goethe at Volfila,25 where Forsh, who had visited Blok after
hearing of the return of Blok’s mother from the countryside, delivered the
news. The conference was suspended in deference to the poet’s memory.
In his diary, Bely, Blok’s poet-twin, wrote that Blok’s death signaled the end
of an era in his own life:
310         -  

Blok’s life is some kind of composite inalienable part of my soul: not the poetry,
not his role in literature, but he himself, “Sasha,” was my closest [friend]—not
on the plane of [social] relations (after 1908 we rarely saw each other), but in the
depth of depths: the “existence” of Blok accompanied me everywhere. I could
be in Moscow, in Petersburg, in Cairo, in Dornach—everywhere I knew, I felt,
that I had a brother . . . I understood that yesterday’s stupefaction [at the fact of
his death] came from the consciousness that “Sasha” [. . .] was a part of me. So
how, then, was this [ possible]? I am alive, but the substance, the living sub-
stance of my soul, has died? Nonsense! I understood that an enormous phase of
my life has ended [. . .] Your will be done [Da budet volia Tvoia]!26

Discussing the proper way to commemorate the death, Bely and Ivanov-
Razumnik juxtaposed silence to the bureaucratic Soviet language that, with
the Bolshevik revolution, had come to permeate everyday life:

Quietly, quietly we remembered A. A. [Alexander Alexandrovich] yesterday.

R. V. [Razumnik Vasilievich] said: “Yes, this was indeed a real human being: is
it possible that we will now honor his memory with ‘evenings,’ ‘conferences’?”
Me: “I can’t imagine it: I, at least, cannot publicly speak vulgarities along the
lines of “we have lost a great Russian poet” and so forth. For me Blok is some-
thing so intimate and delicate that I cannot come out with posthumous
speeches and articles about him.27

Bely and Ivanov-Razumnik aligned silence with the intimate reaction of the
family, and language with public discourse. Their own silence became a testa-
ment to their intimacy with Blok, as opposed to the public co-optation of his
memory through speeches and committees: “Indeed: the mother, the brothers,
the wife of the ‘great one’ do not jump onto the stage, but quietly cry at the
coffin, quietly remember the deceased: for me and R. V., Blok is too close to
create for him a wake of words . . .”28 Bely and Ivanov-Razumnik decided that,
in speaking about Blok, they must avoid the “vulgarity” of politicized Soviet
speeches and that their life’s work would be to preserve his memory.
Their aversion to Soviet bureaucratic commemorations is echoed by a
number of contemporaries, who likewise juxtapose private silence to the public
language that threatens to contaminate Blok and his memory. The literary and
art historian Vladimir Weidle called for silence as the most human reaction to
the death and condemned the word industry that emerged to commemorate
Blok: “Blok died. Let us wait a little, let us be silent. But no, like wound-up
mechanisms, we already build our schemas. When a person dies, let us become
mere human beings for just a little bit. But no, we hurry to use our professional
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n ce 311

skills. We have not yet begun to feel, but we already write . . .”29 The immediate
reaction to Blok’s death is expressed in the juxtaposition of the private and
public, the authentic and the corrupt, language and silence.
Despite their initial reactions, even Bely and Ivanov-Razumnik were not
able to hold onto their silence for long. On August 28, 1921, they called the
eighty-third meeting of Volfila and dedicated it to Blok’s memory. Ivanov-
Razumnik declared that, though perhaps their first impulse to refrain from
public memorialization was correct, they felt compelled to reclaim Blok from
frenzied co-optation:

No sooner had Blok died than from the left and from the right—or, more cor-
rectly: from the right and from the right—emerged various accidental voices
wanting to make a symbol of Blok—not even a symbol, but some kind of regi-
ment flag. We firmly believe that Blok is the symbol of the entire epoch, and a
symbol of himself only; and to those literary and political parties that want to
count him in their ranks, it is necessary from the very beginning to say—hands
off !30

This dichotomy was often developed into a trope of the “two Bloks”: the au-
thentic, private person and the public persona.
Zamyatin—who, between 1918 and 1921, had met Blok almost daily at cul-
tural committee meetings—described the incongruence of Blok’s person and
persona, an incongruence that both disguised the authentic Blok and made
him inaccessible to the public:

A knock at the door—and Blok is in the room. His knightly face—and a funny,
flat American cap. And from the cap—a thought: there are two Bloks—one au-
thentic, and the other—affixed to the authentic one like a flat American cap.
His face—tired, darkened by some kind of fierce wind, is expressionless.31

Zamyatin used the image of Blok’s corrupted public persona in order to

more broadly condemn the intelligentsia’s participation in the bureaucratiza-
tion of everyday life in the first years of Soviet power. His scathing description
of literary life in postrevolutionary Petrograd—a life filled with unending com-
mittee meetings to discuss unrealizable projects (such as Gorky’s enterprise,
World Literature, which Zamyatin mockingly referred to as an attempt to
build a “tower of Babel”)—underscored his hostility and sense of alienation.
Blok’s death became a testament to the fate of “Petersburg” within Petrograd,
which, like the poet in his last years, had grown empty, impoverished, emaci-
ated, silent: “Petersburg—cleared out, empty; stores have been boarded up;
312         -  

houses have been taken apart for firewood; the brick skeletons of stoves.
Ragged cuffs; raised collars; jerseys; knitted sweaters; and inside the sweater—
Blok. Feverish attempts to overcome poverty and some kind of new, momen-
tary, precarious undertaking, some kind of new committees—from commit-
tee to committee . . .”32 In the same ironic tone, Annenkov recollected how
bureaucratic commitments pulled him away from Blok’s funeral to another
committee: “It was awfully windy . . . and in this cold, autumn Petersburg
wind, life dragged us onward: in the twilight of the same day I was already
‘meeting’ in some kind of commission ‘on the affairs of the arts.’”33 In this at-
mosphere of emptiness, decay and death, the futility of “committees,” which,
for Zamyatin, are only “feverish attempts to overcome poverty,” becomes all
the more apparent.34
Zamyatin’s depiction of Petrograd life reveals the disorientation and es-
trangement that many felt as they tried to navigate through state channels. His
description of the bureaucratic chaos involved in securing Blok’s visa so that
he could leave the country for treatment at a Finnish sanatorium, as well as
Gorky’s futile attempts to use his position to help, unveils the bureaucratic web
that tied people to one another in often invisible ways. As it turned out, Blok’s
fate was intimately connected with the fate of Sologub and Chebotarevskaya,
who were also waiting for exit visas. When Lunacharsky found out that the
Politburo planned to issue visas to them and not to Blok, he sent a “hysterical”
letter chastising the committee for their decision: “Comrades, what are you
doing? I asked for both Blok and Sologub, but you are letting out only Sologub,
while Blok, the poet of the Revolution, our pride—there was even an article
about him in the Times—[you are not].”35 The result of this intervention was
truly macabre: the Politburo reversed its decision, issuing Blok a visa that, be-
cause of his critical condition, he was no longer able to use and holding back
Sologub and Chebotarevskaya.36
Ultimately, Zamyatin provided the most explicit and impassioned condem-
nation of the bureaucratized way of life and the intelligentsia’s ambivalent rela-
tionship with the Soviet state by making both complicit in Blok’s death. When,
on the morning of August 7, Alyansky called Zamyatin with news of Blok’s
death, Zamyatin called Gorky to express his indignation and sense of respon-
sibility: “I remember: horror, pain, rage—at everything, at everyone, at myself.
It’s we who are to blame—all of us. We wrote, we spoke—but we should have
screamed, we should have pounded with our fists—so that we could save Blok.
I remember, I couldn’t contain myself and called Gorky.—Blok died. We can-
not be forgiven for this.”37
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n ce 313

“Tha t Whic h Is Alrea dy No t Bl o k”:

The Se r vic es for t h e D ea d
on Ofit se r skaya St r eet

For the last twelve years of his life, Blok had lived in the Kolomna region of Pe-
tersburg, a part of the city that had often been characterized as a liminal zone
between the center of Petersburg and its periphery.38 Blok had mythologized
this quiet part of the city in his poetry, and many who came to his apartment
for the services associated it with the poet himself, often taking note of a neigh-
borhood street lamp or pharmacy that had been immortalized in his verse.
Klara Arsenyeva, a young poet, recollected:

In those days, his magic for us was tied with the fantastical of that northern city.
We often wandered down Ofitserskaya. Once, in the evening, walking past his
windows, we saw him leaning on the wall, reading, through the translucent cur-
tain. His shadow fell on the door and seemed very tall. Across from our apart-
ment was a pharmacy. It always seemed to us that it was that same one: Night,
street, lamp, pharmacy [Noch’, ulitsa, fonar’, apteka].39

Even those who knew Blok intimately described him as an almost ma-
terial part of the city. Indeed, the writer Chukovsky, who, like Zamyatin, had
seen Blok almost daily at the many meetings and committees of Civil War
Petrograd—began his own recollections with an allusion to the poet’s material
connection to the city:

Each time, as I leaf through his collected poetry, I am overcome by various

minute, old-mannish [. . .] everyday memories about him. Reading, for ex-
ample, his famous lines: Night, street, lamp, pharmacy—I recall a Petersburg
pharmacy, owned by the pharmacist Vipnikov, on Ofitserskaya Street, not far
from the Pryazhka Embankment. Alexander Alexandrovich walked or rode
past this pharmacy every day, probably even several times each day. It was on
his way home and is referred to twice in his poem “Dances of Death” [“Pliaski
smerti”].40

For many Blok was coupled with Petersburg, and the estrangement highlighted
during his final trip to Moscow confirmed the poet’s intimacy with the former
Russian capital: “Blok is all made of the Neva, the fog of the white nights, the
Bronze Horseman. Florid, physical, mercantile Moscow is alien to him, just as
he is alien to Moscow. His readings in Moscow—in May of 1921—made this
evident.”41 The sense of estrangement that enveloped Blok in his final days was
314         -  

tied not only to the geographic space of Moscow, but also to the historical tra-
jectory of postrevolutionary Russia.
Antsiferov, a member of the excursionist and preservationist movements
and “the most influential figure in early-twentieth-century St. Petersburg
studies,”42 considered Blok to be the poet closest to the “city of double exis-
tence” that combined the prosaic and the fantastical, the ordered and the
chaotic, the corporeal and the ghostly.43 In an essay on Petersburg in Blok’s
poetry, Antsiferov writes that, despite the fact that none of Blok’s poems is
wholly devoted to the city, no other poet has afforded it such importance of
place: “A. Blok had experienced his city. The hours of the changing years, the
snowy winter nights, the pale sunrises, were all familiar to him. All parts of
the city—its harbor, outskirts, houses, the avenues through which the city is
entered—found an echo in his poetry, and assumed a new life in his art.”44
Over the course of Blok’s life, the city had become an essential part of his
poetry, and of course the poet, with his famous endless walks through Peters-
burg, was inscribed into the city’s streets.45
On the evenings of August 8 and 9, Blok’s friends, and even some strangers,
who visited 57 Ofitserskaya for the services for the dead, came to see Blok’s
body for the last time and to take part in the communal ritual of mourning the
icon of the Silver Age. By nine o’clock, the line stretched along Ofitserskaya,
as people ascended the “narrow staircase” and, placing flowers on the coffin,
moved along, making room for others.46 Maria Beketova, Blok’s aunt and first
biographer, described the heat in the apartment, the open windows, and the
constant flow of people bringing flowers with which “the body of the poet was
covered.”47 Artists sketched the corpse of the deceased, photographs were
taken, and a plaster mask was made of Blok’s face and hands.48 The philhar-
monic choir sang quietly.49
Like others, Bely made his way down Ofitserskaya, past young women with
flowers in the courtyard of Blok’s apartment. Upon entering the apartment,
Bely, emotionally unable to place flowers on the body on the dining-room table,
retreated into a corner of the room. He noted Anna Akhmatova’s presence—
her dark clothing and “distressed” appearance.50 The academician Wilhelm
Zorgenfrey described her “quiet weeping” as part of the overall silence of the
apartment.51 Indeed, Forsh wrote that this silence became the wake’s most
memorable element—a silence “unplanned, and suddenly decided upon,” a
silence she likens to Blok’s silent poetry.52
Perhaps most notably, those who attended the services described the ap-
pearance of Blok’s corpse, which death had transformed to the point of unrec-
ognizability. Interestingly, contemporaries converge in their unwillingness to
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n ce 315

aestheticize Blok’s dead body. For Bely, for instance, this transformation severs
the connection between the living and the dead:

I walked up to bid farewell to that, which is already not Blok; this “something”—
has changed: wax fingers, a dark face, slightly overgrown with a beard (it seems
that he had not shaved this last week); he is lying there—in a frock coat; his
face—has changed: dark-yellow, stern, mournful, aged; in one word—“not
Blok” . . . I understood that Blok—was not there, that he was within us. And I
walked away.53

Bely’s alienation from Blok’s corpse is echoed by others: Alyansky noted quite
simply that “the face of the deceased had in the course of the illness changed so
much that in the coffin it was impossible to recognize him,”54 yet Forsh wrote
that while it is likely that Blok resembled “all deceased,” she was struck by the
appearance of his face—the “narrow nostrils and the unclosed mouth, torn by
unheard screams.”55 The poet Sergey Bernshteyn observed that “in the coffin
he did not look like his portraits, his face expressed only a deep apathy, an abso-
lute emptiness of the soul.”56 Zorgenfrey remarked on the anonymity of Blok’s
corpse and underscored the sense of estrangement evident in Bely’s account:

A. A. was lying in the attire of the dead with an emaciated, pale-yellowish face;
above the lips and along the cheeks grew short, dark hairs; the eyes had sunk
deeply; the straight nose became pointed and grew a protuberance; the body,
dressed in a dark suit, straightened and dried out. In death his look of greatness
had wasted away, and he had taken on the image of suffering and decay, typi-
cal of any dead person.57

For Zorgenfrey, Blok’s pale-yellowish face, sunken eyes, and pronounced nose
made the poet assume an anonymity “common to any dead man.”58 The post-
mortem transformation changed not only Blok’s face but his entire body: he
noted the lightness of Blok’s corpse as he lifted it into the coffin—a lightness
“incommensurate” with the deceased’s height and frame. Indeed, for Zorgen-
frey, this served as evidence that “death clearly indicated its triumph over the
beauty of life.”59
Descriptions of estrangement from Blok’s dead body were frequently used
to emphasize a sense of estrangement from old Petersburg culture, the land-
scape of the city, and everyday life. This grotesque transformation of Blok’s
corpse often underscored the grotesque course of Russian history. Lev Trotsky,
the revolution’s most prominent ideologist, explained that “of course, Blok was
not one of us, but he reached towards us. And in doing so, he broke down.”60 If
the revolution was the most profound force transforming Russia, Blok became
316         -  

the revolution’s most poetic casualty. Indeed, the “breaking down” of Blok’s
initial enthusiasm for the revolution became the narrative of his death. As the
literary scholar Galina Rylkova observes,
If in the eyes of the Bolsheviks and their supporters Blok’s death was caused by
his inability to transform himself into a new artist, then in the eyes of their op-
ponents Blok was seen as one of the first victims of such a transformation. “He
was wasting away in front of our eyes,” reported an anonymous correspondent
to his compatriots abroad, “and it was becoming more and more difficult to
recognize him. I am sending you the picture of the deceased on his deathbed.
You can see for yourselves that, positively, not one feature of that charming
image that everybody who had a chance to know him remembers so well re-
mained unaltered. [Blok’s death] is symptomatic of the regime, in which we are
all suffocating.”61

Many described Blok’s illness, as well as his literary silence after 1918, as his
growing deaf to the “music” of History: in this sense, the mystery of his illness
came to signify the symbolic degeneration of his life force.62 The death of the
poet’s physical body—its slow decline and grotesque postmortem transforma-
tion into an unrecognizable corpse—came to represent the effects of the revo-
lution on a particular vision of Russia’s past and present. Blok’s body became
the body of the intelligentsia writ large, his suffering transferred onto the bodies
of the living, becoming the expression of their own martyrdom.

Init ia t ion int o a Dying Wo r l d :

T h e Nar ra t ive of a n Unknown Yo u n g Wo m a n

While some focused their descriptions on the intimate atmosphere in the Blok
apartment during the services for the dead, others experienced this day on the
streets of Petrograd. The young Berberova, removed from the inner circle, nar-
rated this day as a journey from the periphery to the center of Petersburg cul-
tural life. Her memoirs differ in tone from most of the recollections of the older
generation; while for many of the older participants, Blok’s death marked the
death of an age, for those of the younger generation, like Berberova, taking
part in the ritual of Blok’s death brought them into the dying world of Peters-
burg culture and the myth of the dying city. Berberova, in 1921 still an un-
known young woman, portrayed Blok’s death as her rite of initiation into liter-
ary life.
She learned of Blok’s death at the Writer’s House on Basseynaya Street
while trying to learn more about Gumilev’s arrest; like many others, she came
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n ce 317

across the announcement posted on the wall: “I was seized by a feeling, which
I never again experienced, that I was suddenly and sharply orphaned. The end
is near . . . We will remain alone . . . The end is coming. We are lost . . . Tears
spurted out of my eyes.”63 She recounted her astonishment at coming across a
flower shop on the way to the service:

Slowly I walked down Liteyny, turned at Simeonovsky and the Fontanka. On

the corner of Simeonovsky and the quay I stopped by a florist. Indeed, I re-
member my astonishment that in Petersburg there was a florist open. Eating-
houses and second-hand shops had been started; there was something like a
hardware shop on Vladimirsky and a hairdresser in the second courtyard of a
building on Troitsky. But the flower shop, it seemed to me, had not been there
on Tuesday when I passed by with Gumilev; now it was open and there were
flowers in it. I went in. I don’t remember if I had ever entered a flower shop be-
fore, perhaps this was the first time. Petersburg florists were once among my
childhood fairy-tale places. Paris florists . . . New York florists . . . All have their
character. I had a little money. I bought four long-stemmed lilies. There was no
wrapping paper in the store, and I carried the lilies to the Pryazhka [embank-
ment] unwrapped. And I thought: Passers-by guess where I am going and to
whom I am bringing flowers, they read the announcements stuck on the street
corners, they already know the news, and will follow me; a subdued crowd we
will arrive—the whole city—at Blok’s house.64

Berberova described her miraculous procurement of flowers on the empty

streets of Petrograd, turning them into a talisman that allowed her to cast her-
self in a special role. In her account, her flowers were the only flowers at the
services—a fact contradicted by a number of accounts, which more often note
the overabundance of young women with flowers. Yet the flowers are not only
meant to highlight the economy of scarcity but also become the vehicle
through which Berberova is initiated into Blok’s mythologized death.
The allegory of initiation is developed further in her description of arriving
in Kolomna:

Somewhere on the corner of Kazanskaya I took a tram and when I got off at
the very end of Ofitserskaya Street, I realized that I had never in my life been
here and I did not know this neighborhood at all. The river Pryazhka, the green
shores, factories, one-storey houses, grass on the streets, and for some reason
not a soul. A ghostly, quiet part of Petersburg, where there is a smell of the Bal-
tic Sea—or does it only seem so to me?65

The description, likely influenced by literary accounts of Kolomna, creates an

atmosphere of silence and emptiness that surrounded Blok’s death. Like others,
318         -  

Berberova noted his changed appearance, although her image of the living
Blok came not from personal experience but from the postcards of him repro-
duced by the thousands and cherished by young women in early twentieth-
century Russia:

He no longer resembles the portraits I keep in books, nor that live man who
once read on a stage: To the marshy, deserted meadows [Bolotistym, pustyn-
nym lugom] . . . The hair has become dark and thin, the cheeks emaciated, the
eyes have sunk. The face is overgrown with a dark and thin beard, the nose has
become sharper and more prominent. Nothing remains, nothing. An “un-
known corpse” lies there. The hands are bound, the feet too, the chin presses
into the chest.66

Berberova’s depiction of the dead body is remarkably consistent with

earlier accounts, and it is likely that her narrative was colored by existing de-
scriptions. Yet unlike the poet’s close friends, she portrayed his death as both a
rupture and beginning. Despite remarking on the strangeness of the corpse, she
continued her description of the service in a lively tone, noting the “sun
play[ing] on the window” and the “green sloping shore of the Pryazhka.” The
funeral became a threshold that Berberova crossed to the inner circle: “Na-
dezhda Pavlovich enters (a week ago she had flashed by me at the House of
Arts), then Pyast comes, and someone else. I see them entering, I know only a
few; only about two months later would I identify them all.”67 Indeed, Berbe-
rova, in her mythical narrative, descended into the netherworld and, having
partaken in the ritual of death and initiation, emerged reborn into literary life.

“A nd S i l e nt ly t he Ea r t h Swa llowed H i m U p ”:
The Funera l

On August 10, 1921, a day remarkably clear and blindingly bright, Petersburg
buried Alexander Blok. A white coffin bearing the poet’s body was carried out
of his apartment on Ofitserskaya Street, down the dark, winding staircase,
through the courtyard, past the arcs of the gates, and out to the embankment of
the Pryazhka River. A crowd waited outside. Several hundred people had
come to bid farewell to the poetic voice of old Petersburg. In the crowd one
could notice the many faces of old Petersburg: Akhmatova, Bely, Forsh, Zor-
genfrey, Viktor Shklovsky, Marietta Shaginyan, Mikhail Kuzmin, Evgeny Iva-
nov, Vladimir Pyast, Vladimir Gippius, Akim Volynsky, and Viktor Zhirmun-
sky; artists Annenkov, Alexander Benois, Konstantin Somov, and Lev Bruni;
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n ce 319

composer Arthur Lurye; the entire troupe of the Bolshoy Theater and opera
singer I. V. Ershov. “Everyone was there,” wrote Kuzmin. “It would be faster
to count those absent.”68 Yet while some noted the many persons present at the
event, others described the “emptiness” of the funeral—the diminished ranks
of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia—despite the actual number of people in
the procession: “By the gateway out in the street, a crowd was waiting . . . All
that remained of literary Petersburg,” wrote Zamyatin. “And only there did it
become evident: how few remained.”69
The procession moved down Ofitserskaya and Alekseevskaya, past Li-
tovsky Castle (the prison destroyed in the postrevolutionary chaos), the Mariin-
sky Theater, and toward the Nikolaevsky Bridge, one of the important urban
sites of Bely’s Petersburg. Once over the Nikolaevsky Bridge, the procession
moved along the embankment of the Neva until it reached the Sixteenth
Line, then along the deserted streets of the Vasilievsky Island toward Smolensk
Cemetery.70 Blok’s body was carried in an open coffin, while the lid was carried
separately: “The coffin was carried in a straight and comradely manner, and
the body of the poet, decorated with flowers, was visible to everyone.”71 The
pallbearers—Bely, Pyast, Vladimir Gippius, Evgeny Ivanov, Zamyatin, and
Zorgenfrey—carried the coffin the entire six kilometers to the cemetery, and,
as the procession moved along, passers-by joined the crowd.72 The empty
horse-drawn carriage trailed behind. The poet’s wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna, and
his former lover, the actress Lyubov Alexandrovna Delmas, supported Blok’s
mother, Alexandra Andreevna Piottukh. Photographers followed the proces-
sion, “dealing unceremoniously with the crowd and giving some sort of imper-
tinent orders.”73
They arrived at Smolensk Cemetery on Vasilievsky Island. To the right
of the cemetery entrance, at the tiny Church of the Resurrection, the choir of
the Mariinsky Theater sang Rachmaninov’s mass and the Tchaikovsky liturgy
during the final service for the dead.74 Anonymous young women, weeping,
brought flowers to the coffin and kissed Blok’s hand.75 After the service, Blok’s
white coffin was carried along the tiny, overgrown paths to the Beketov family
plot, which had been chosen as his final resting place.76 The grave was marked
by a simple, unpainted wooden cross. No one spoke. Bely, grabbing on to a
birch tree, “looked at the grave with large, widened, almost rectangular, eyes.”77
It is on this note of silence falling over Blok, Blok’s poetry, and Petersburg that
Zamyatin eloquently concluded his narrative: “And finally—underneath the
sun, along the narrow tree-lined paths—we carry that foreign, heavy some-
thing that is left of Blok. And silently—in the same way that Blok was silent in
these years—silently the earth swallows Blok up.”78
320         -  

Sile nt Dea t h

Death rituals traditionally contain the regenerative seeds of life, providing a

passage through the danger of liminality, bridging the past with the future.79
With this in mind, Blok’s funeral is peculiar in two ways: first, the participants
consistently used silence as a mode of expression; and second, in the unstable
transition between War Communism and NEP, the use of ritual silence em-
phasized the finality of rupture over regeneration and continuity.
In August 1921 Petersburg/Petrograd experienced the death of Alexander
Blok and the subsequent death of Nikolay Gumilev as “a single eschatological
symbol.”80 Both fell victim to the new Soviet order—Gumilev was executed on
August 24, while Blok, in the words of Nadezhda Pavlovich, “suffocated” in the
“deathly silence of approaching NEP.”81 With Blok’s funeral, a silence fell over
the city. “Then all quieted down. For two weeks we lived in complete under-
ground silence. We spoke in whispers. I went to the Muruzi House, to the
Writer’s House, to the House of Arts. Everywhere there was silence, waiting, un-
certainty. The 24th of August arrived.”82 Khodasevich, who, like many, learned
shortly after hearing about Gumilev’s arrest that Blok was dying, remarked that
the deaths of the two poets became intertwined. “Macabre letters arrived from
Petersburg, passing over [these deaths] with half-hints, silences,” wrote Khoda-
sevich. “When I returned to the city, people had not yet recovered.”83
In the imagination of the city’s inhabitants, the summer of 1921 became an
uncrossable threshold, the death of an entire epoch of Russian culture:

That August was not only “like a yellow flame, like smoke” (Akhmatova), that
August was a boundary line. An age had begun with the “Ode on the Taking
of Khotin” (1739), and had ended with August 1921; all that came afterwards
(for still a few years) was only a continuation of this August: the departure of
Bely and Remizov abroad, the departure of Gorky, the mass exile of the intelli-
gentsia in the summer of 1922, the beginning of planned repressions, the de-
struction of two generations—I am speaking of a two-hundred-year period of
Russian literature. I am not saying that it had all ended, but that an age of it
had.84

With Blok, wrote Shklovsky, “an epoch in the life of the Russian intelligentsia”
came to a close. “The nonbelievers buried him who believed [. . .] The last
faith was lost [. . .] By next winter, a stable way of life already existed.”85
Shklovsky portrays Blok’s funeral as the last spectacle of an epoch not destined
for a future in the new Soviet state, a view supported by Konstantin Fedin, a
member of the ascending Soviet literary establishment:
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n c e 321

strangely, it felt that with Blok, the former epoch had gone, that epoch which,
having lived until the revolution, took a step into its sphere, as if showing where
to go, and fell exhausted by the strain of its long journey. It became obvious that
from there no one will take such a step now, or if they repeat it, then it won’t con-
tain the bravery and sadness regarding the truth of the future exhibited by
Alexander Blok. Many understood that now the highest poetic hopes are being
transferred to the future.86

Like others, Fedin cast the poet’s death, and 1921 more generally, as a histori-
cal turning point that finalized a rupture with the past and cemented the im-
possibility of return. Blok’s life, as Shklovsky portrayed it, had a trajectory of
flight that, under the force of gravity, ultimately returned back to earth: “He
was dying, returning to the past.”87 Indeed, in the recollections of contempo-
raries, Blok’s death often became the closing act of their own life narratives.
Within the extraordinary political and cultural context of 1921, the mean-
ing of Blok’s death extended beyond the boundaries of the individual, as if to
reify the legendary words “Petersburg will be empty,” that were associated with
the birth of the city. Starting with Khodasevich’s noting the mysterious biolog-
ical causes of his death (“he died of death”) and Zamyatin’s description of
Blok’s corpse as “not a portrait of the dead Blok, but a portrait of death in gen-
eral,” his death was portrayed as a final event, a rupture in time, and became
the funeral of an epoch. Paradoxically, considering the enormous amount of
writing about it, the poet’s actual death was shrouded in silence—it was a dead
death. What died with Blok on August 7, 1921, what was buried with him three
days later at Smolensk Cemetery on the margins of Petrograd, was a Peters-
burg without a future. The silence, perhaps appropriately, mourned the death
of a world in which Blok was possible.


1. Nina Berberova, Alexander Blok: A Life, trans. Robyn Marsack (New York: George
Braziller, 1996), 144–45.
2. V. Weidle, “Peterburgskaia poetika,” in N. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4
(Washington, DC: Viktor Kamkin, 1968), xxxvi. Unless otherwise noted, all translations
from Russian in this chapter are mine.
3. Alan Warren Friedman, Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5. On commemorative rituals, see Peter Metcalf,
Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 25.
4. Viktor Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922, trans. Richard Shelton
(Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004), 241–42. I translated nad mogiloi as “at the
grave” instead of the literal “over the grave.”
322         -  

5. On silence in ritual, see Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000) and Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Adam Jawor-
ski (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997).
6. In March 1921 the Kronstadt uprising exacerbated an already desperate situa-
tion. After the revolt, which happened during the Tenth Party Congress, the Soviet
government adopted the New Economic Policy (Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice: State
and Society 1917–1922 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991], 23, 42–43, 412).
7. Ekaterina Yudina, “‘Looking Back in Extreme Anguish’: St. Petersburg in the
Autobiographic and Collective Memory of the 1920s,” in Moscow and Petersburg: The City
in Russian Culture, ed. Ian K. Lilly (Nottingham, England: Astra Press, 2002), 91–101.
8. Polina Barskova, “Enchanted by the Spectacle of Death: Forms of the End in
Leningrad Culture (1917–1934),” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006).
9. Emily Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevede-
nie (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006), 204.
10. Barry Scherr, “Notes on Literary Life in Petrograd, 1918–1922: A Tale of Three
Houses,” Slavic Review 36, no. 2 ( June 1977): 256.
11. Olga Forsh, Sumasshedshii korabl’ (Washington, DC: Interlanguage Literary
Associates, 1964), 91.
12. In March 1920, after the death of Blok’s stepfather in January, the poet and his
wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva-Blok, were forced to move into the apartment of
Blok’s mother, Alexandra Andreevna Kublitskaya-Piottukh. Blok had moved to 57 Ofi-
tserskaya in June 1912 and spent the last nine years of his life in this building, first in
apartment 21 on the fourth floor and then, after 1920, in apartment 23 on the second.
13. This incident is recorded in numerous memoirs by those who were present at
the reading and by those who only heard of it later. See the memoirs of Korney Chu-
kovsky and Samuil Alyansky (who accompanied Blok on his Moscow trip), as well as the
recollections of Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Mayakovsky (who attended Blok’s read-
ings in Moscow). See Chukovsky, “Alexander Blok,” in Alexander Blok v vospominaniiakh
sovremennikov, ed. Vladimir Orlov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980), 219;
Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” in Alexander Blok, 458; Pasternak, “Liudi i polozheniia,”
in Alexander Blok, 470; Mayakovsky, “Umer Alexander Blok,” in Alexander Blok, 180.
14. Very few people saw Blok in the last months of his life. The most interesting and
reliable firsthand accounts are by Alyansky and Nadezhda Pavlovich. Needless to say,
Blok’s wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna, provides the most intimate account of Blok’s last days.
15. Vladislav Khodasevich, “Gumilev i Blok,” in Nekropol’: Vospominaniia. Literatura i
vlast’. Pis’ma B. A. Sadovskomu, ed. A. Sil’vanovich and M. Shatin (Moscow: Sovpadenie,
1996), 136.
16. See Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 13. Boym references Roman Jakob-
son’s formulation that the death of the poet turns into a literary fact that “prohibits clear
boundaries between literature and life, revealing the uncanny ‘literariness’ of life and
the transgressive vitality of texts. The death of the poet is the ultimate act of ‘defamiliar-
ization’ that unearths complexities and contradictions of any seemingly coherent poetic,
ideological or critical system” (13).
17. Yudina, “‘Looking Back,’” 96.
18. Avril Pyman, The Life of Alexander Blok: The Release of Harmony, 1908–1921, vol. 2
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 378.
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n ce 323

19. Samuil Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” in Alexander Blok, 458.

20. E. Knipovich, Ob Aleksandre Bloke: vospominaniia, dnevniki, kommentarii (Moscow:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987).
21. Yury Annenkov, Dnevnik moikh vstrech: tsikl tragedii (Leningrad: Isskustvo, 1991), 85.
22. Pyman, Life of Alexander Blok, 378.
23. Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” 324–25.
24. Andrey Bely, O Bloke, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Avtograf, 1997), 570.
25. Vol’naia filosofskaia assotsiatsiia (the Free Philosophical Association), of which
Blok was one of the founders.
26. Bely, O Bloke, 447–48.
27. Ibid., 449.
28. Ibid.
29. V. Weidle, “O Bloke,” in Pamiati Aleksandra Bloka, ed. Andrey Bely, R. V.
Ivanov-Razumnik, and A. Z. Shteinberg (Tomsk: Izd. Vodolei, 1996).
30. Ibid., 54.
31. Evgeny Zamyatin, Ia boius’ (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), 149.
32. Ibid., 117.
33. Annenkov, Dnevnik, 86.
34. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 117.
35. Cited in David Bethea, Khodasevich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1983), 199.
36. Ibid.
37. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 123.
38. Julie Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005), 142.
39. Klara Solomonovna Arsenyeva, “O Bloke,” in Alexander Blok, 453.
40. Korney Chukovsky, “Alexander Blok,” in Alexander Blok , 219.
41. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 121.
42. Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned, 97.
43. Nikolay Antsiferov, “Nepostizhimyi gorod,” in O Bloke: sbornik literaturno-
issledovatel’skoi assotsiatsii Ts.D.R.P., ed. E.F. Nikitina (Moscow: Nikitinskie subbotniki,
1929), 296–97.
44. Ibid., 307.
45. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 121. Polina Barskova’s essay in this volume describes Blok
as Petersburg’s “flâneur par excellence” and indeed uses his famous walks as a way to
access “a panoramic vision of the artistic life of Petersburg of the time.”
46. Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” 324–25.
47. M. A. Beketova, Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke (Moscow: Izd. Pravda, 1990),
200–201. “Not only friends and acquaintances arrived, but even absolutely extraneous
people [postoronnie liudi]. [. . .] the singer Ershov, who was living in the same house as the
Bloks, and other neighbors. Marietta Shaginyan was one of the first to bring flowers,
which she placed at the body of the deceased. [. . .] Soon the body of the poet was
covered with flowers. The weather was hot, all the windows were open. The Bolshoy
Dramatic Theater took upon itself the decoration of the coffin, sent to the deceased by
the state. [. . .] Among those present was the actor Monakhov, to whom so recently the
deceased poet sent his regards. The literary people arrived, and Volfila with Ivanov-
Razumnik at the head. Everyone was deeply shaken by this early, tragic death” (201).
324         -  

48. Attention to Petrograd’s economy of scarcity figures prominently in Shklovsky’s

Zhili byli, where he describes the bureaucratic obstacles he encountered procuring the
plaster for Blok’s death mask (Viktor Shklovsky, Zhili-byli: vospominaniia, memuarnye zapisi,
povesti o vremeni: s kontsa xix v. po 1964 g. [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966]).
49. Vladimir Orlov, Zdravstvuite, Alexander Blok (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1984),
412–15.
50. Bely, O Bloke, 449–50.
51. Akhmatova emerged in August of 1921 as the mythical “widow”—many ob-
served that she was not only the widow of Gumilev (to whom she was no longer married),
but that she was also the widow of Blok (with whom, despite rumors, she never had a
romantic relationship).
52. Forsh, Sumasshedshii korabl’, 150–52. In Forsh’s fictionalized memoir, the poet
Gaetan represents Blok.
53. Bely, O Bloke, 449.
54. Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” 325.
55. Forsh, Sumasshedshii korabl’, 152.
56. Sergey Bernshteyn, Alexander Blok, 359. Bernshteyn made sound recordings of
Blok reading his poetry shortly before his death.
57. Wilhelm Zorgenfrey, “Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (Po pamiati za piatnad-
tsat’ let: 1906–1921),” Alexander Blok: Pro et Contra: Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo Aleksandra Bloka v
kritike i memuarakh sovremennikov, ed. N. Yu. Gryakalova (St. Petersburg: RKhGI, 2004),
473–98.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Lev Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strumsky (New York: Russell
and Russell, 1957), 125.
61. Galina Rylkova, “Literature and Revolution: The Case of Alexander Blok,”
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 628.
62. Viktor Erlich, Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26.
63. Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Phillip Radley (New York: Knopf,
1992), 123.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 123–24.
66. Ibid., 124.
67. Ibid.
68. Mikhail Kuzmin, “Dnevniki M. Kuzmina,” in Alexander Blok: Novye materialy i
issledovaniia, vol. 2, ed. I. S. Zilbershteyn and L. M. Rozenblum, Literaturnoe Nasledstvo
92 (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 164. Indeed, many noted the absence of Gorky, who was in
Moscow.
69. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 123.
70. Olga Bondareva, “Put’ k khramu (pokhorony Aleksandra Bloka),” in Nasledniki
velikogo goroda: Fragmenty dokladov uchashchikhsia Sankt Petersburga na gorodskikh istoriko-
kraevedcheskikh chteniakh 1998 goda (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii gorodskoi dvorets
tvorchestva iunykh, 1998), 86–90. Each street on Vasilievsky Island consists of two sides,
odd and even, each of which was called a line. In Bely’s Petersburg, Dudkin’s garret room
T h e Vo ic es o f S i l e n ce 325

is on the Seventeenth Line, on the street down which Blok’s funeral procession moved
toward Smolensk Cemetery. In the novel, Dudkin’s path from the Seventeenth Line on
Vasilievsky Island, over the Nikolaevsky Bridge, and to Nevsky Prospect is described in
detail. As we consider famous Petersburg itineraries, there is an interesting conver-
gence between Blok’s funeral procession and Dudkin’s fictional path in Bely’s Petersburg.
The question naturally arises whether Bely recollected this convergence during the
procession.
71. Beketova, Vospominaniia, 200–201.
72. Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” 325.
73. Beketova, Vospominaniia, 200–201.
74. Orlov, Zdravstvuite, 414; Pyman, Life of Alexander Blok, 378.
75. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 123.
76. This spot, as it turned out, was not to be Blok’s final resting place, as, twenty-
three years later, in 1944, his remains, along with the remains of his wife, mother, and
Beketov grandparents were moved to the Literatorskie mostki of Volkovo Cemetery.
Blok’s black granite monument became part of the Soviet literary necropolis.
77. Shklovsky, Zhili byli, 158–59.
78. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 123.
79. See Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Arnold van Gennep, Rites of Passage
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
80. Boris Gasparov, “Introduction,” Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From
the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, and Irina Paperno
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 13–14.
81. Nadezhda Pavlovich, “Iz vospominanii ob Aleksandre Bloke,” in Alexander Blok,
400.
82. Berberova, Italics Are Mine, 125–26.
83. Khodasevich, “Gumilev i Blok,” 138–39.
84. Berberova, Italics Are Mine, 125–26. In 1923 Bely returned to the Soviet Union
from his stay in Germany.
85. Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 241–42.
86. Konstantin Fedin, “Alexander Blok,” in Alexander Blok, 418.
87. Shklovsky, Zhili byli, 158–59.
 Concluding Remarks
    

If the reader has not yet perused the Web site titled Mapping Petersburg, we
invite the reader to do so. The Web site is quite literally a virtual part 3 of
“Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City 1900–1921, even though the two exist as
wholes unto themselves.1 What we understood from the inception of this proj-
ect is that modernism, its narrative and representational practices, contained
the seeds of hypertextuality. Just as the collapse of binaries had already been
observed in modernist aesthetics, the contemporary Web experience may be
compared to the sensory psychic shock associated with the modern city, which
Bely aligns with the “swarming” Russian metropolis of 1905. We call this expe-
rience surfing the Web, as we become part of the anonymous World Wide Web
after learning how to navigate its initially shocking alienating space, an experi-
ence that may be compared to the way residents and visitors learn how to navi-
gate metropolitan cities. The explosion of digital map-based media and related
mapping narratives, of which our Web site is an example, helps mediate physi-
cal and virtual space and thereby makes the physical familiar. The desire to su-
ture physical urban space and the way it was experienced at the beginning of
the twentieth century was already the focus of the German sociologist Georg
Simmel, who wrote about the contingent relationship of proximity and dis-
tance not only in spatial but also affective terms. The coeval literary and visual
arts did something similar. They represented the fusion of physical and psychic
space by using fragmented and spatialized narrative and imagery. Such an ap-
proach to the novel typifies Bely’s Petersburg.

327
328       

If hypertext is defined by a nonlinear network of links, a new form of inter-

connectedness premised on a disjunctive structure, then Bely’s novel, like James
Joyce’s Ulysses, to which Petersburg has been compared, qualifies as one of the
starting points of hypertext. The claim that “if Joyce were writing today, he
would have chosen hypertext” is a commonplace of contemporary criticism:
“And not only was “Ulysses” before its time in literary terms,” writes Karlin
Lillington; “it is also, extravagantly, the über-hypertext.”2 A hypertext version
of Joyce’s novel resides on the Web, as do the Sirin edition of Petersburg in
Russian and the Maguire and Malmstad English translation (Limited View on
Google Books).3 Working with Bely’s novel online is a very different experience
from reading it in book form, opening it up to innumerable research possibil-
ities determined by the individual user.
We can compare our approach to Petersburg to the multiple ways of view-
ing the city through the hypertext practice of overlaying city maps on specific
experiences of city life. Such suture structures Mapping Petersburg, featuring a
1907 historical map with ten interactive itineraries through the Russian capital
that explore its burgeoning modernity and literary modernism. Mimicking
Bely’s narrator, we can rightfully claim that our city essays emerge from the
digital dots on the Web site map, that from it emerges part 2 of the printed
book “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City. We can also claim that just as the two
Petersburgs, fictional and physical, exist in relation to each other in the vol-
ume, so too do its essays relate to the hypertextual Web site. In any case, the
inscription of early twentieth-century Petersburg in the space of the Web offers
the reader the next best thing to an intimate encounter with the late imperial
Russian capital.
The spatial focus of the essays, beside an urban concern, reflects their ori-
gin in hypertext narrative: hypertext, a spatial medium, can be entered from
different locations, like a city, which in the words of Gilles Deleuze “is defined
by entries and exits.”4 Unlike most verbal narratives that develop in time, re-
quiring the reader to enter at the beginning, hypertext narrative has multiple
entry points that are determined by the user. In this regard and in regard to
modernism, its structure can be said to resemble avant-garde collage, which
consists of multiple objects and texts revealing the relational aspect of juxta-
position, the staple of cyberspace. The spatiality of hypertext and its multiple
entry points produce a multiplicity of perspectives and immediacy of experi-
ence, which in Mapping Petersburg offers the virtual experience of navigating a
historical city and putting its sites in contact with each other. This a printed
text cannot do, nor can it offer the kind of rapid participatory attractions and
montage of images, sounds, and texts that characterizes the Web.
Co n c lu d in g R e ma r k s 329

The Web creates networks, or grids, like those that define cities—for in-
stance the network of tramlines—to overcome distance, so we can say that our
Web site is a kind of matrix of Petersburg’s proximities and contiguities. The
itineraries bring together distant parts of the city by linking them through a va-
riety of narrative frames that tell a variety of stories about the ever moving and
mutable historical city. Narratives can be divided into those that have definitive
endings and those that don’t. The former, which characterize traditional texts
that anticipate closure, provide the anticipated pleasure of that closure. Using
the tram analogy, we take the tram with the purpose of traveling to a particular
stop that brings us to the city location we intend to go to or explore as visitors.
This kind of goal-oriented navigation is of course possible on the Web, but the
real pleasure of hypertext is associated with the unexpected and with the ran-
dom. If we continue with the tram analogy, the hypertext experience can be
compared to the random street scenes, signboards, and anonymous pedestrians
we see through the tram window. One of these fleeting images may very well
pique our curiosity, causing us to forego the original destination, at least for a
time; we get off at an unplanned stop to see the scene close up and quite unex-
pectedly enter a different narrative from the one we initially envisioned. Walter
Benjamin calls such exploration “straying,” losing oneself in the city, which he
identifies with experiencing its signboards and streets, passers-by, roofs, and
kiosks. Such a city experience resembles surfing the Web.
Hypertext privileges thinking fragmentally, a hallmark of the twentieth
century from the beginning, and whose latest iteration is the Web. It gives pref-
erence to random contingencies, temporary connections of fragments, rather
than to wholes and fixed structures. This is precisely what our itineraries
through Petersburg of the beginning of the twentieth century offer through
interactivity and intersection. Like Walter Benjamin of The Arcades Project, an
inspirational starting point for our project, we have collected, reproduced, and
juxtaposed fragments of maps, written texts, visual images, and sound with the
purpose of creating itineraries through Petersburg that explore the city in
unexpected new ways. As we take the virtual-tram itinerary (“Tramvai”), we
may want to stop on Nevsky Prospect or at Trinity Bridge (“The French in St.
Petersburg”) across the Neva River. Or if we took the tram to the city periph-
ery, perhaps quite unintentionally, we may want to explore the sites of the Kar-
povka River; if we find ourselves on the outskirts of Petersburg’s slaughterhouse
(“Anatomizing Modernity”), we may want to pursue the slaughtered cow to the
various sites where its parts end up; or if we want to find out something about
apartment houses and office buildings in Petersburg of the time, we will visit
the Tower House of Singer. Learning that Alexander Blok liked to stroll the
330       

Karpovka locales, we may want to attend his funeral or his play The Puppet Show
(“The Enchanted Masquerade”). As we navigate the virtual prerevolutionary
capital and unexpectedly come upon the remains of the carriage of the Minis-
ter of the Interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, we most likely stop to learn more
(“Visions of Terror”). Or if we want to learn about the tourist’s experience of
Petersburg, we may want to open the postcards itinerary.5
The relationship between the book on Petersburg and the accompanying
Web site serves as an illustration of the differences between print and hypertext
scholarship, with the former typically offering a teleological narrative, a finished
product, whose meaning is defined by its line of argument and the conclusions
it draws and by the conventions of the profession. Authorial agency is clearly
defined in such a narrative. Hypertext narrative, by contrast, disperses agency
and liberates the author from the anxiety of producing a finished product—an
experience with which all of us are also familiar. Hypertext feeds the authorial
desire of not letting go of the text. It resembles a draft that offers the author the
power of endlessly enhancing it, instead of having to suppress this desire—to
repeat: hypertext defies closure. Typically collaborative, it offers the possibility
of including new authors—in our case, new Petersburg itineraries that were
added over time. As to the user, it gives the user greater authority by placing her
inside the text, offering the possibility of determining narrative progression—
not once, but over and over again. In other words, just as the desire of the orig-
inal authors of hypertext is defined by unfinalizability, so is the desire of the
users who, so to speak, create their own hypertext narratives.
Each Petersburg itinerary exists simultaneously on a historical city map
and as hypertext pages consisting of fragments of historical experiences and
texts, with hyperlinks in between, which include stops on the other itineraries.
Exploring them mimics the paradigmatic hypertext path of browsing the Web,
which George Landow claims in his pioneering study Hypertext cannot be re-
produced a second time.6 All Web users are familiar with this experience as
they try to retrace a hypertext path to no avail. The interactive experience
of Mapping Petersburg can be said to simulate the open-ended exploration of
any real city—whether on foot or by motor, with or without map in hand—in
contrast to navigating it in accordance with a well-worn or predetermined
path. Mapping has become a hypertext term, and the mapping of cities served
as an original hypertext paradigm, famously reflected in the Aspen Movie Map,
the first hypermedia system developed at MIT in 1978, which simulated a drive
through the ski resort in the Rockies on a computer screen.7
There are numerous Web guides to Petersburg, mostly in Russian and
mostly focusing on standard tourist sites. The beautifully designed Alexander
Co n c lu d in g R e ma r k s 331

Palace Time Machine is devoted to the history of the Romanov royal family and
their residences.8 The most extensive and authoritative guide to the city is the
Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia, launched by Alexander Kobak, the highly respected
historian of Petersburg, in conjunction with the city’s tercentenary in 2003.9
Both are extraordinarily rich resources that are essentially linear in structure.
Our volume cum Web site makes a contribution to the history of Petersburg
by representing perspectival fragments of the city’s material life and marginal
corners without, however, neglecting its high culture. As such it offers a unique
teaching resource to humanists and social scientists not only in the Russian
field but also in urban studies.


1. Mapping Petersburg, http://stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/index.html.
2. Karlin Lillington, “Ulysses in Net-town,” http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/
1998/06/16feature.html.
3. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, http://www.lib.ru/POEZIQ/BELYJ/peterburg.txt.
4. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in Rethinking Architecture:
A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 313. In describing
the city, Deleuze calls it “the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of
circulation and of circuits which create it and which it creates” (313).
5. Here is the list of city itineraries on the Web site in the order they are listed on
the opening page: “Tramvai” (Alyson Tapp); “Karpovka” (Polina Barskova); “Anato-
mizing Modernity” (Mieka Erley); “Nevsky Prospect” (Olga Matich); “The Funeral of
Alexander Blok” (Victoria Smolkin); “Postcards from Petersburg” (Stiliana Milkova);
“Visions of Terror” (Alexis Peri and Christine Evans); “The French in St. Petersburg”
(Lucas Stratton); “The Tower” (Ulla Hakanen); “An Enchanted Masquerade” (Cameron
Wiggins); “The Singer Sewing Machine” (Olga Matich).
6. George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992).
7. Jacob Nielsen, Multimedia and Hypertext (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman,
1994), 40.
8. Alexander Palace Time Machine, http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/.
9. Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia (English version), http://www.encspb.ru/en/.
 Postscript
St. Petersburg: New Architecture and
Old Mythology

        

In spite of reason, contrary to the elements.

A. Griboedov, Woe from Wit

Over the course of St. Petersburg’s relatively short but dramatic biography,
real facts and practical problems have often become intertwined with questions
of myth. Providing rich material for poets and artists and depending little on
reality, the mythology has had a long life of its own. Now, after three hundred
years, it lives on, sometimes inspiring architects to make provocative decisions.
Here we will examine two projects presented at international competitions in
St. Petersburg at the onset of the twenty-first century, both of which are con-
nected to the “basic myth” of Petersburg’s history: the well-known myth of how
the city’s founder, Tsar Peter, defied the elemental forces, both natural and
human.

De fying t he Elemen t s

In his attempts to build a new city in the delta of the Neva River, the tsar en-
countered two principal opponents: the river itself and the habits of his sub-
jects. Strictly speaking, the Neva is not a river but rather a long and narrow
strait extending from Lake Ladoga to the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea. The

332
P o s t s c rip t 333

strait emerged 2,500 to 3,100 years ago, making it a quite recent event in terms
of geological time.1 Hence the Neva has no valley, and its water flows flush
against its banks.
An air of catastrophe has always hovered over the Neva: having no valley,
the river would immediately spill over whenever the water rose in the Gulf of
Finland, which would occur during a strong western wind.2 The city’s history
began with one such catastrophe. In May 1703, under the tsar’s order, a Rus-
sian military brigade began to erect an earthen fortress on a small, low island in
the delta, but in August the water rose and washed away the settlers and all that
they had managed to build.
But let us give the Neva its due: at first it behaved with a degree of modesty
in regard to the inexperienced Russians. The water level rose “all of ” seven
feet. Subsequently, however, the Neva did not hesitate to rise to the level of
eleven, even fourteen feet. During the most frightening flood we know, the
water rose to twenty-five feet and flooded the surrounding area for many miles.
That happened in 1691, when Peter was nineteen years old. He had already
ruled the country on his own for two years and had most likely heard from
foreigners that the waters around the Neva delta had destroyed all the Finnish
and Russian villages and Swedish villas. Ten years before the beginning of the
Northern War between Russia and Sweden, the Neva used the same means
once again to warn everyone that it alone, and not the king of Sweden or the
Russian tsar, controlled the delta. This forewarning was meaningful inasmuch
as the war, having exhausted both countries, was primarily fought for the Neva
region, which belonged to Sweden.
At the price of twenty years of effort, Tsar Peter achieved his main goal: he
conquered the region, but there was nothing he could do with the Neva. It
flooded whenever it wanted and caused great damage to the city the tsar was
building in the Neva delta. Peter ordered that the ground level be raised, using
soil amassed from the digging of canals, but there was not enough soil. Lore
links his death with the flood at the end of 1724, when he caught a severe cold
while trying to help the city dwellers.
One hundred years later, after the extremely destructive flood of 1824, an
elevated stone dam across the Gulf of Finland was planned to protect the city
from the Baltic Sea and the Neva’s onslaughts once and for all. However, it
was just as impossible to build such a barrier in the 1820s as it would be
seventy years later “due to its great cost and unlikelihood of its expected use-
fulness,” as the City Duma put it in an 1898 decision.3 That which the impe-
rial capital could not accomplish, the Soviet government tried to accomplish
in 1981, earmarking state funds for a gigantic dam of about fourteen miles. The
334      

construction dragged on for twenty-five years and is nearing completion only

now. During that time a 490-foot model of the dam was built in a laboratory.
The tests run against this model have shown that the dam would not be able to
save the city from catastrophic floods like those of 1824 and 1924. The old for-
mulation about the “unlikelihood of [the dam’s] expected usefulness” remains
in force.
Yet Peter the Great lives on in the memory of his descendents as the hero of
a myth, as the conqueror of the wild natural elements. When Catherine II de-
cided to erect a monument to him, the invited sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falco-
net insisted that the equestrian statue be elevated upon a rock, “serving as a
pedestal for him—an emblem of the difficulties he has overcome.”4 From that
time on The Bronze Horseman has remained above the water even during the
severest floods, the symbol of a city that the Neva can no longer destroy, even
though that elemental force has not surrendered. In 1909, during the first resto-
ration of the monument, four hundred gallons of water were discovered and
pumped out from inside the statue. Apertures were drilled through the belly
and the legs of the horse so that water would not accumulate in it. Now water
could freely flow through The Bronze Horseman, as though mocking its con-
queror. In the middle of the 1930s, microscopic cracks and apertures in the
bronze were filled. But by the middle of the 1970s, there were again so many
cracks that they threatened the monument’s stability. They had to be filled
once more.
But let us briefly consider how the old Petersburg myth becomes apparent
in the city’s newest architecture. In 2001 the federal government conducted an
international competition for the construction of the Mariinsky Theater’s sec-
ond building. The American investors who won the competition invited the
eminent Californian architect Eric Owen Moss to take on the project. The first
version of the project, which was not accepted, was an utterly unusual design
consisting of two separate parts: a simple rectangular box (new audience space,
second stage, and ancillary facilities) that extended deep into the block; the sec-
ond part, which overlooked the street, provided a view of the square on which
the current theater is located. This second part consisted of a large glass body
that was very oddly and irregularly shaped. The architect himself stated that
this structure symbolized the elemental force of water, which he considered the
“main theme” of St. Petersburg. For this reason the glass body (the vestibule,
foyer, and other public spaces) resembled three enormous transparent bags
stacked on top of one another. “It’s like bags of water,” said the architect. Pres-
ently in Holland, similar plastic bags—filled with water—are being made to
serve as dams to protect the land from the sea. So this unusual architecture, or
P o s t s c rip t 335

Eric Owen Moss Architects, second version of design for Mariinsky Theater, 2003 (courtesy of Eric
Owen Moss Architects)

sculpture, was to symbolize the defeat of the dangerous water element that had
previously loomed over the city.
In 2003 Eric Owen Moss proposed a second version. This time the glass
body no longer consisted of separate bags inertly lying in front of the boxlike
building. Instead it resembled a clear elastic film protruding on various sides. It
seemed that the film could barely hold up against the fierce pressure of some
living force that tried to break out of the building onto the street, that it was
only a bit longer and the film would burst. Instead of a victory over the elemen-
tal forces, the design represented a struggle that was still in full swing with its
outcome uncertain. Incidentally, one hundred years ago the artists of the World
of Art group, along with symbolist poets, had proposed precisely such an inter-
pretation of the mythical conflict with the elements.
Despite Moss’s brilliant design and the expressive, dramatic quality of his
project—which had left a very strong impression on all—the second version
was also rejected by the city authorities and architectural community. Could
this not have been due to the fact that this design did not reflect the traditional
myth of victory over the force of nature?
336      

“ In Spit e of Re a son,” o r
t he Huma n Ele me nt a l Fo rc e

It is known that from 1703 to 1718 between twenty and thirty-five thousand
workers from all parts of the country were brought to expedite the construction
of St. Petersburg.5 Roughly every fifth worker would die of disease, either dur-
ing the long journey—which was hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, by
foot—or while working in harsh conditions.6 In order to create a stable popula-
tion, Peter drove just as many people into the city—members of the gentry,
merchants, artisans from other cities—though not always with success.7 The
Kingdom of Moscow (not yet the Russian empire) had to pay such a “human
tax” for its new capital.
Properly speaking, Peter had decided to build a city here not in 1703 but in
1712, with the intention to build it on an island. He did not care much for the
disorderly, medieval-like town that spontaneously emerged along the sides of
the Neva before 1712. For that reason he first selected a location far from the
delta, on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, and began to build a new capital
according to his own, strictly regulated project (the town of Kronstadt is lo-
cated there now). But in a few years, the tsar rethought his project and in 1716
began once again—also according to a regulated project—to build a capital on
another island, Vasilievsky, right in the delta. He commanded those who had
started to build their homes in other places to relocate to Vasilievsky. Of course
those who had endured work and great expenses to settle the previous areas did
not want to resettle and resisted passively; the tsar waged a veritable war with
them, sending military detachments to lift the roofs from their homes, but even
this method did not drive the whole population onto Vasilievsky. Apparently
many could not tolerate such a life and fled, so to curtail such flights from the
city, the tsar meted out harsh punishment for the parents, wives, and children
of all of those who fled.8
As a result, at the turn of the 1710s and into the early 1720s, Peter was forced
to abandon both his beloved idea of the island-capital and the slavish labor its
construction entailed. Those lands in the delta that were more built up were
declared the territory of the capital city. Among them the Admiralty Side espe-
cially stood out, facing, as it did, the rest of Russia. In essence then, the tsar suf-
fered a great defeat in a war with his own people.
Peter’s heirs maintained his strategy for the compulsory settlement of the
new capital. In 1728, during the reign of his grandson Peter II, the court moved
back to Moscow; once again in 1732, however, it returned to the Neva under
Empress Anna Ioannovna. Almost the entire population of Petersburg had fled
P o s t s c rip t 337

during the course of those years; the city became deserted to such an extent
that wolves wandered the streets by night. People had to be forced into the cap-
ital once again, with measures so harsh that the people’s former hate of Peters-
burg only grew stronger. In the heat and the wind of the summers of 1736 and
1737, the city dwellers (especially from the lower classes of the population) set
fire to their own city, first and foremost the Admiralty Side, so that this more
populous part of the city was almost completely destroyed by fire.
Here the myth devoted to the tsar’s victory over the human elemental
force falls silent. A small but influential circle of Peter’s educated proponents
formulated and disseminated this myth during the tsar’s lifetime and beyond, a
legend that included the image of Peter as the almost divine creator of a new
perfect people. Such was man created anew:
The wise do not lose hold of Peter’s decrees
By which we have suddenly become a new people already.9

In the meantime everything burned down by the “old people” had to be re-
built. Before the fires, this territory was built without a unifying plan. Only
now, after the fires, was it possible for Peter’s heirs to do what he had not been
able to do: to plan in an organized way this prominent section of the capital.
The 1730s postfire plan of Field Marshal Burchard Christoph von Munnich
and architect Peter Eropkin turned out to be a masterpiece of baroque urban-
ism and exists to this day. If Peter could see it, he would be ecstatic: a distinct
artistic order has fully replaced the untamable elemental force of chaotic over-
growth that he could not tolerate.
Built at the behest of Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, the Winter
Palace (1754–61), the tallest and most exquisite secular building in the capital,
became the crowning achievement of Petersburg’s postfire Baroque. After that
time, to build anything taller than the Winter Palace was considered inad-
missible. In 1844 Nicholas I institutionalized the prohibition that no building in
the capital could be higher than seventy-seven feet (the height of the Winter
Palace’s cornice) by legislating it; it was even suggested that buildings be re-
stricted to seventy feet so that the palace would have no rivals.10 Only churches
remained exempt from the restriction.
Soon afterward, in conjunction with the laying of railroads, Petersburg’s in-
dustrial development was underway, and land values began to increase rapidly.
The seventy-seven-foot prohibition forced entrepreneurs to build very dense
city blocks. Consequently, at the outset of the twentieth century, the entire city
ended up uniform in height, and its even skyline reproduced the Neva delta’s
flat landscape. This triumph of artifice was achieved “in spite of reason” and
338      

found itself in sharp conflict with land values in the capital. Hence it was in the
early 1910s that the first ideas to build skyscrapers in downtown St. Petersburg
came to the fore (the first cautious attempt was made by the Singer Sewing
Machine Company on Nevsky Prospect a few years earlier).11 By the same
token, the human elemental force—but this time in its economic guise—strove
to remove all prohibitions, but the First World War and subsequent political
upheavals proved great setbacks, and the question of tall buildings fell by the
wayside for a long time.
During the Soviet period the seventy-seven-foot prohibition concerning the
historical city center was merely an aesthetic pretense. Only in the 1970s were
there new violations, which were linked to a commercial approach, specifically
in the case of multistory hotels. Today, with the return to a market economy,
there have been more and more such infringements, most of which are eco-
nomically determined. In other words, they manifest a human elemental force:
the desire to extract maximum of profit from very expensive land. The city
government introduced new zoning regulations in the 1990s for the first time:
the closer the new building is to the historic city, the greater the restriction to its
rising above the surrounding rooftops.
How has this aspiration to break through all aesthetic restraints manifested
itself in Petersburg’s newest architecture? The Gazprom Tower project has be-
come the most flagrant violation of all the high-rise restrictions. Midway into
the first decade of the twenty-first century, the powerful and extremely rich
state-owned oil company Gazprom decided to house its headquarters in St. Pe-
tersburg. A plot of land at the confluence of the Okhta and Neva rivers, across
from the renowned masterpiece of eighteenth-century baroque the Smolny
Monastery (whose architect was Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the builder of
the Winter Palace), was selected. In 2006 an international architectural com-
petition for the design of the building complex was announced. According to
Gazprom’s wishes, a tower rising to nearly one-thousand feet was supposed to
serve as the main part of this complex, although city zoning law forbade build-
ing anything higher than 157 feet there. Under pressure from Gazprom, the
jury selected the design by RMJM Architects, a British group that had pro-
posed a 1,030-foot tower. A show of protest was expressed by three internation-
ally famous architects who resigned from the jury: Kisho Kurokawa, Sir Nor-
man Forster, and Rafael Vinoli. According to Vinoly, all three were absolutely
against “inappropriate high-rise construction at the junction of the Neva and
Okhta rivers, in the immediate proximity of the historic city center.”12
The jury’s selection provoked a storm of protest in the city, not only in the
mass media but also in the streets. Various social groups conducted street
RMJM Group, competition version of design for Gazprom Tower, 2006 (drawing by Grigory
Kaganov)
340      

demonstrations, demanding that the jury’s decision be annulled and that Gaz-
prom not be allowed into the city.13 It is not difficult to understand the city
dwellers’ indignation: they had grown accustomed to holding the even skyline
of St. Petersburg in high esteem. The Dutch also protest the construction of
skyscrapers out of love for their flat landscape and traditional low-rising houses.
UNESCO has safeguarded Petersburg’s historical center for some time now,
and it has also protested and demanded that such a tall tower not undergo con-
struction on the Okhta. But there is another side to this story. No matter how
one feels about the tower, it serves as a sort of retribution for the regime of arti-
fice that has reigned in the city since 1844. The ban on constructing anything
higher than seventy-seven feet can be compared to the ancient Chinese custom
of foot-binding, which inhibits normal growth. The foot, completely distorted
by the binding, was thought especially beautiful—it is also, if you will, a victory
over the human elemental force, achieved “in spite of reason.” The uniform
height of all buildings in old Petersburg was considered and continues to be
considered especially beautiful in precisely the same way.
Those who are not devoted to this (intrinsically baroque) type of beauty
may regret the fact that the First World War interfered with the construction of
the not-very-tall art nouveau and neoclassical revival skyscrapers in the city
center. The Neva delta’s cityscape would have ended up different, as well as
more diverse and tolerant, in the long run, and the current invasion of the
market-economy forces [stikhiia] would not seem as sudden and as shattering as
it does now.
Translated by    


1. G. A. Isachenko, “Okno v Evropu”: istoriia i landshafty (St. Petersburg: St. Peters-
burg University Press, 1998), 24. At that time Ladoga’s waters flooded the ancient valleys
of the local Izhora and Tosna rivers, creating a watershed between them.
2. The earliest written accounts of great floods are dated to 1060, with subsequent
floods noted in 1300, 1541, 1555, and 1594. See http://www.semiotic.ru/d/his/flood.
3. Ibid.
4. E.-M. Falconet to I. I. Betskoy, http://walkspb.ru/pam/medn_vsad.html.
5. E. V. Anisimov, Iunyi Grad. Peterburg vremen Petra Velikogo (St. Petersburg: Dmitry
Bulanin Publishers, 2003), 108–9.
6. Ibid. Evgeny Anisimov estimates that the number of people who worked to build
St. Petersburg (in total for a period of fifteen years) was approximately five hundred
thousand; among them, one hundred thousand people died.
7. In 1712, according to Felix Lurye, the tsar demanded that twenty-five thousand
gentry families be sent to Petersburg, but in two years he settled on a quarter of that
P o s t s c rip t 341

amount (F. M. Lurye, Peterburg—istoriia kul’tury v tablitsakh, 1 [St. Petersburg: Zolotoi vek.
Diamant Publishers, 2000], 16, 18). Clearly, the tsar’s initial demand had not been
fulfilled.
8. Ibid., 14.
9. A. D. Kantemir, Sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1956), 75. This
“Satire II, on the Envy and Pride of Ill-Mannered Noblemen” (“Satira II, Na zavist’ i
gordost’ dvorian zlonravnykh”) was written at the end of 1729, when the court had
returned to Moscow and the gentry could once again live at their old estates and forget
about St. Petersburg.
10. Manifest in this law was a belated triumph of baroque regularity, which had
suppressed the spontaneous growth of the cityscape. Nicholas I’s personal control over
all architectural projects in the capital demonstrates the same aspiration.
11. See the essay on the Singer sewing machine in this volume.
12. From interview with Raphael Vinoli, Kommersant-Daily 3 (3579), January, 17,
2007 (www.koomersant.ru). See also Kisho Kurokawa’s interview with the Rosbalt In-
formation Agency on December, 27, 2006 (www.rosbalt.ru/2006/12/27/280582.html).
In the end, only one architect remained on the jury, with the other seven jurors being
either high city government officials or Gazprom representatives.
13. For more information on public protests against the Gazprom Tower, see
http:// saint-petersburg.ru/ m/ 20300/ stroitelstvo_gazprom-siti_w_peterburge
._za_i_1.html; and http://www/metbashne/ru/page-refer.html; http://grani.ru/
Culture/m.127073.html.
 Contributors

          is assistant professor of Russian literature at Hampshire Col-

lege in Massachusetts. She received a BA from St. Petersburg State University and PhD
from the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly publications include articles
on Nabokov, the Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film, and the aestheticization of histori-
cal trauma. She has also authored seven books of poetry in Russian and has published
her first book of poetry in translation in 2010 (This Lamentable City). Currently she is
working on a book about the Siege of Leningrad titled “Petersburg Besieged: Culture of
the Aesthetic Opposition.”

         is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Lit-

eratures at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is completing a dissertation
on Russia’s literary and cultural relationship with Central Asia. Her scholarly interests
include documentary film, ethnography, and the rhetoric of science in literature.

            received her PhD in history from the University of California,

Berkeley, in 2010. Her dissertation, entitled “From Truth to Time: Soviet Central Tele-
vision, 1957–1985,” explores the production and content of Soviet Central Television
during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Her research interests include the relation-
ship between mass media and political and cultural change, and the place of uncer-
tainty, risk, and game-playing in Soviet culture and everyday life.

          is a PhD candidate in Russian literature in the Department of

Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation concerns depictions
of male same-sex love in Russian literature and articles include “In Defense of Differ-
ence: Homosexualities East and West” (Europe-Evropa: Cross-cultural Dialogues, 2010).

        is professor of Russian literature at the University of California,

Berkeley. Her most recent book is Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de
Siècle (2005), of which an expanded version was published in Russian (>nlpfucoh^]
qplmf]: .l`lc ncifafleklc olek^kfc f fin de siècle ` 1looff, 2008). She is currently

343
344 Contrib utors

working on the interwar Russian emigration and on the representations of clouds in

literature and the visual arts.

  is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Berkeley.

She is completing her dissertation, entitled “Minds Under Siege: Rethinking the Soviet
Experience inside the Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1945.” The dissertation is based on 120
diaries kept by Leningraders during the siege and explores the effects of the Blockade on
established personal, ideological, and historical narratives in Soviet society.

         is a PhD candidate in Russian literature at the University of

California, Berkeley. He spent a year in Moscow conducting research on French and
Russian symbolist poetry under the auspices of the Fulbright program. He is writing a
dissertation on pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary avant-garde poetry.

              -     is assistant professor of history at Wesleyan

University. She received her PhD in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley. Her
dissertation, “‘A Sacred Space Is Never Empty’: Soviet Atheism, 1954–1985,” examines
the Soviet secularization project. Her scholarly interests include the study of religion,
everyday life, ritual culture, and the history of Soviet social sciences.

        is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and

Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing a dissertation
titled “From the Elegy to the End of the Novel: Literary Experiences of Emotion.” Her
scholarly interests lie in Russian literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, especially in the history and form of the novel. She has published articles on Anna
Karenina and on the Formalist scholar Boris Eikhenbaum.

             is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages

and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing her disser-
tation, titled “The Drama in Disguise: Dramatic Modes of Narration and Textual
Structure in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel.”
 Index
abstraction, 19, 77, 83; and Bely, 88, 90–113;
and Kandinsky, 85–88, 90–99, 103–7,
110–13; and theosophy, 86, 90–94, 105
Adamson, Amandus G., 258n16
aesthetics: avant-garde, 83–113; baroque, 18,
28n58, 56, 59, 64–65, 68, 70, 74, 77,
80n24, 82n55, 337–38, 340, 341n10; con-
structivism, 274, 278, 280; cubism, 8, 19–
20, 28, 39, 44, 55, 84, 119n57, 125, 274;
expressionism, 19–20, 45, 68, 70, 73–74,
83–84, 107, 113n1, 114n7, 119n57, 120n76;
futurism (cubo-futurism), 35–36, 42, 48,
88, 119n57, 120n77, 134, 278; impression-
ism, 84–85, 111–13, 120n76; modernism
(see modernism);neoprimitivism,119n64;
realism, 84, 266–70; and spatial form,
20, 84; and splitting the atom, 86–89; su-
prematism, 114n5; surrealism, 15, 43–44,
67–68, 79n22; symbolism, 77, 81n42, 83–
86, 96, 111–13, 120n76, 179, 254
affect, 18, 19, 21, 195, 327; disgust, 18, 55–78,
269–71, 275, 283
Akhmatova, Anna, 188, 260n47, 314, 318, 320,
324n51
Aldanov, Mark, 51n13
Alexander I, 12, 199, 234n18
Alter, Robert, 9, 19, 34, 83, 124
Alyansky, Samuil, 309, 312, 315
animals: humans as, 22, 46, 63, 65–69; slaugh-
ter, 262–79. See also eating
Anisimov, Evgeny, 340n6
Anna Ioannovna (Romanov), 336
345
Annenkov, Yury, 309, 312, 318
Antsiferov, Nikolay, 4, 11–15, 132, 314; The Soul
of Petersburg (Dusha Peterburga), 11, 15, 76, 307
apocalypse, 11, 19–20, 112; and the city, 32, 95,
99, 103; horsemen, 90, 96, 110; Last Judg-
ment, 91; and Petersburg myth, 65, 103;
and Revelation, 34, 90, 103
architecture, 4, 12, 303n23, 334–40; apartment
house, 203, 206, 295; art nouveau/style
moderne, 4, 198, 233n8, 295; bridge, 220,
232n1, 233n8n10; office building, 133,
239
Armstrong, Tim, 273
Arsenyeva, Klara, 313
Ashbe, Anton, 115n13, 119n65
Auslender, Sergey, 174, 187
Averchenko, Arkady, 88
Azef, Evno, 35, 51n13, 14, 156, 159, 162, 170n8,
170n13, 172–73n43
Bachelard, Gaston, 285, 291–92, 294
Bakst, Leon, 176, 298
Barskova, Polina, 307
Barthes, Roland, 14, 48
Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 27n50, 78, 214n47,
237n44, 281n20, 283–85, 289, 290–93,
297, 303n29, 304n39; Benjamin on, 21,
118n45, 164, 191, 285, 289–91, 301n2,
302n18
Beketova, Maria, 314, 323n47
Belinsky, Vissarion (Physiology of Petersburg ),
198–99, 216n71
346
Bely, Andrey: biography, 81n44, 85–86, 115n15,
175, 183, 197; on Blok’s funeral, 309–11,
315, 319; and color theory, 100, 103
Bely, Andrey, drawings: Angel, 90, 92, 116n27;
Nikolay Apollonovich Ableukhov, 70–73, 72
Bely, Andrey, works: Arabesques, 39; “Art” (Iskus-
stvo), 88, 231; Beginning of the Century (Na-
chalo veka), 96, 111, 116n25, 210, 213n37;
Between Two Revolutions (Mezhdu dvukh revo-
liutsii), 25n13, 51n16, 52n18, 53n33, 113n1,
114n5, 115n13, 272; Christ Has Risen (Khri-
stos voskres), 114n7; “Circular Movement”
(Krugovoe dvizhenie), 24n13, 117n41;
“The City” (Gorod), 6, 14, 36, 99, 118n52;
Dramatic Symphony, 53n40, 99; Emblematics
of Meaning (Emblematika smysla), 24n13;
First Meeting (Pervoe svidanie), 87; “Forms of
Art” (Formy iskusstva),” 86, 96–97, 99,
118n48; Gogol’s Craft (Masterstvo Gogolia),
56, 78n4, 79n19, 95, 103, 117–18n43; Kotik
Letaev, 25n23, 27n47, 120n71; On the Border
of Two Centuries (Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii ),
59, 84–84; Pepel, 118n54; Petersburg (see Pe-
tersburg); Snowstorm Goblet (Kubok metelei ),
54n40; “Why I Became a Symbolist” (Po-
chemu ia stal simvolistom), 111–12
Benjamin, Walter, 6, 25n17, 36–37, 172n30,
195, 231, 233n5, 237n47, 272, 329; on
Baudelaire, 21, 118n45, 164, 191, 285,
289–91, 301n2, 302n18; the collector, 21,
141–42, 203; the flâneur, 21, 38, 52n25,
164–65, 28. See also flâneur/flânerie
Benois, Alexander, 11–12, 26n35, 115n8, 206,
214n50, 295, 298, 318
Berberova, Nina, 305, 316–18
Berdyaev, Nikolay, 19, 28n60, 45, 82n49, 83,
114n7
Berman, Marshall, 10, 153
Bernshteyn, Sergey, 315, 324n56
Besant, Annie, and Charles Leadbeater, 90,
113, 117n38; Thought-Forms, 93, 103,
117n33; Vague Selfish Affection, 106, 106–7
Blok, Alexander, 11, 21–23, 81n43, 140, 174–93,
284–96, 300; and Baudelaire, 285, 290–
92, 303n29; and Bely, 51n16, 78n2, 150,
175, 183, 283; death and funeral of, 22,
305–25
Blok, Alexander, works: City cycle, 291; “Illu-
sion” (Obman), 293; “Islands” (Na ostro-
vakh), 293; The Last Days of Imperial Power
I nd ex
(Poslednie dni imperatorskoi vlasti ), 230; The
Puppet Show (Balaganchik ), 174–81, 183, 186–
87; The Snow Mask (Snezhnaia maska), 176,
179–80, 189–91; “The Stranger” (Nezna-
komka), 179; The Twelve (Dvenadtsat’ ), 140
Blok, Lyubov Dmitrievna (Mendeleeva),
51n16, 52n18, 81n41, 177, 180, 183, 289,
292, 293, 296, 303n25, 308, 309, 319,
322n12, 325n76
body, 17–18, 22–23, 50n5, 62, 65, 74–75; anus,
68–69; back (tail, spine), 31–50, 53nn39–
40, 54n41, 63; corpse, 56, 59, 64, 77, 315–
16; ears, 32, 35, 45, 68; excrement, 18,
69; eyes, 35–36; face, 33, 44, 64, 74; lips/
mouth, 32, 57, 63, 68–70, 73–74, 80n35,
82n49; nose, 32, 50n4, 68; and slaughter,
263–71
Böcklin, Arnold, 113n1
Bogomolov, Nikolay. See Malmstad, John
bomb, 39, 48, 53n34, 88, 95, 116n23, 118n43,
150–51, 271; as Bely’s metaphor for cre-
ativity, 39, 88, 91, 231; in Petersburg, 32,
34, 39, 66, 77, 86–88, 90, 151; as trope
(producer of form and narrative), 9, 17–
18, 43, 55, 59, 252–53. See also terrorism
Booth, W. R. (The “?” Motorist ), 7
Borisov-Musatov, Victor, 113n1, 115n16
Bowlt, John, 14, 114n7
Boym, Svetlana, 322n16
Brilliant, Dora, 165
Bruno, Giuliana, 13
Bryusov, Valery, 197
Buckler, Julie, 16, 199–200, 295, 302n4
Bulgakov, Mikhail, 4, 129
Bulla, Karl, 128, 243, 245, 258n19
Burlyuk, David, 48, 114n5, 114n7
Carstensen, Fred, 249
Certeau, Michel de: The Practice of Everyday Life,
4, 139, 158, 231; and production of narra-
tive, 139, 191, 195, 236n33, 250; and un-
readability, 15, 37, 48, 61, 76, 195; and vi-
sion (close-up/bird’s eye), 8–9, 13, 48, 61,
76, 195, 203, 240, 242
Cezanne, Paul, 10
Chebotarevskaya, Anastasia, 305, 312
Chernyshevsky, Nikolay (What Is to Be Done? ),
246, 249, 259nn24–25
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 31–34, 39, 45, 50,
52n17; “A Defense of Detective Stories,”
In d ex
33–34; “On Detective Novels,” 33; The
Man Who Was Thursday, 31–33, 44, 49,
50n8, 51n13
Chicherin, Georgy, Kuzmin’s letter to, 197–98
Chukovsky, Korney, 308, 313
Chulkov, Georgy, 176, 180, 192n6
cinema/cinematic vision, 7, 16, 36, 99–101,
118n51, 134–35, 205, 273, 277–78, 279,
280
city: and affect, 17–19, 55–56, 61, 327; and the
crowd (swarm), 8–9, 19, 21, 25n23, 37,
49, 51n13, 53n29, 67, 99, 118n45, 165–68,
203, 206, 226–27, 272, 284, 301n2, 327;
dying city, 11, 37n26, 65, 68, 306–7, 316;
labyrinthine, 9, 37; London, 32–34, 37,
51n13, 172n41 (see also Poe, Edgar Allen);
and phantasmagoria, 6–7, 11, 15, 20,
32–33, 36, 99–100, 152, 154–56, 225; as
text, 6, 11, 139, 195, 231 (see also Certeau,
Michel de); Venice, 13, 133, 187–88.
See also maps and mapping; modernity;
Paris; perspective; Petersburg; Petersburg
Clark, Katarina, 11, 205n17
Clark, T. J., 285
Clayton, Barbara, 250, 259n30
commercial life: advertisement and marketing
(signboards), 6–7, 100–101, 107, 128, 273,
307; and homosexual subculture, 206,
208; restaurants, 187, 193n22, 200, 208,
215n60, 288; shops, 6–7, 214n47, 249,
265, 289, 317; Singer sewing machine
marketing campaign, 240, 242–48,
258n8, 258n15
Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent, 33, 39, 51n13
Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 28n58, 328, 331n4
Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav, 119n65, 213n33, 298;
Barbershop Window, 107, 108, 119n67; City
Types, 107, 109; October Idyll, 59, 101, 102
Dolgopolov, Leonid, 15–16, 28n52, 113n1, 229,
237n41
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 10, 11, 42, 57, 289; Crime
and Punishment, 10–11, 26n30, 34, 43, 53n30;
Poor Folk, 248
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (Sherlock Holmes), 34–
35, 51n16, 52n17
Duncan, Isadora, 86, 289
eating: and cannibalism, 18, 57, 59, 63, 67–70,
79n22, 80n35, 268; and meat, 262–79
347
Eikhenbaum, Boris, 135–39
Elias, Norbert, 56, 63
Elizabeth (Elizaveta Petrovna), 337
Eropkin, Peter, 337
everyday life and domestic sphere: and homo-
sexual subculture, 206, 208; and produc-
tion/consumption of meat, 262–64; and
sewing, 242, 246, 250–51; and the tram,
129–30, 139–41. See also Certeau, Michel
de; commercial life
Exter, Alexandra, 114n7
Falconet, Étienne-Maurice, 14, 80n24, 334
female sphere: and disgust, 63; and domestic/
industrial labor, 242–45; and feminism,
249; and the seamstress, 248–51, 254–56,
260n47
flâneur/flânerie, 18, 38, 52n25, 141, 287; and
Baudelaire, 21, 191, 285, 290–91, 297;
and Blok, 284, 288–95, 302n9, 303n29;
and detective/criminal, 38–39, 52n25,
164–65, 172n41; and shock, 272, 279
Forsh, Olga, 307, 309, 314–15, 318, 324n52
Foucault, Michel, 7, 8, 13, 28n54, 35, 43, 44, 158
Frank, Joseph, 20, 84
Freud, Sigmund, 76
Friedman, Alan, 306
gaze, 15, 17, 35, 79n22, 100, 133, 240–41,
292. See also panoptic vision; perspec-
tive; Petersburg
Gazprom, 338, 339, 340, 341n12
Gelfman, Gesya, 292
geometry, 18n48, 125, 135–36, 171n23, 195,
226, 293
Gershuni, Grigory, 159, 173n44
Ginzburg, Lidiya, 143
Gippius, Vladimir, 318–19
Gippius, Zinaida, 79n23, 140, 150, 168, 170n12,
253, 256, 260n52; “Electricity” (Elektri-
chestvo), 253–54; How We Wrote the Soldiers
and What They Answered Us (Kak my voinam
pisali i chto oni nam otvechali ), 255; “The
Seamstress” (Shveia), 254
Glebova-Sudeykina, Olga, 178
Gogol, Nikolay, 10, 32, 35, 50n5, 56, 78n4,
79n19, 101, 103, 117n43, 118n51
Gollerbakh, Erikh, 307
Gorky, Maksim, 282n29, 307, 312, 320, 324n68
Gorodetsky, Sergey, 176, 187, 210, 289, 296
348
Grabar, Igor, 115n14
Grebyonka, Evgeny, 285–88, 303n23
Grevs, Ivan, 12–15, 27n44, 116n21
Grünewald, Matthias, 114n7
guidebooks, 12–16, 157, 199, 214n41; All of Pe-
tersburg on Your Palm (Ves’ Peterburg na la-
doni ), 200, 204; Guide to Petersburg (Putevo-
ditel’ po Peterburgu), 262; imitation of in To
the Courts . . . ! Homosexual Petersburg (K
sudu . . . ! Gomoseksual’nyi Peterburg), 209;
Karl Baedeker, 12, 26n37, 233n11
Gul, Roman, 51n13, 53n39
Gumilev, Nikolay, 260n47, 298, 205–6, 316–
17, 320, 324n51; “The Lost Streetcar”
(Zabludivshiisia tramvai), 131–34, 143
Guys, Constantin, 297–98, 300
Harvey, David, 155
Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 231–32, 237n48
Heidegger, Martin, 218, 233
Heine, T.-T., 113n1
Hérédia, José-Maria de, 222–24, 234n15,
235n19, 235n23
Homer (Odyssey), 250
homosexual desire: and city subculture, 206–
9; and Petersburg, 47, 66, 69, 75, 81n37
Hood, Thomas, 248, 259n24
Hugo, Victor (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), 14
hypertextuality, 18, 20, 23, 143, 145, 250, 279–
80, 327–30. See also Web sites
industrial life: and city infrastructure, 125, 128;
and factories, 258n7, 279, 293, 295–97;
in Petersburg (on the “Islands”), 47; and
slaughterhouse, 264–66
Ivanov, Evgeny, 318–19
Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 15, 22, 176, 194–98, 202–
4, 210, 318; and The Tower (apartment
building), 14, 48, 187, 196–97, 202, 260n47
Ivanov, Vyacheslav, works: “The Poet and the
Mob” (Poet i chern’), 203; To the Stars
(Po zvezdam), 213n33
Ivanova, Vera, 178, 187
Ivanov-Razumnik, G. V., 50n8, 93, 309–11,
323n47
James, Henry, 51n13
Jawlensky, Alexey, 115n14
Johnson, Emily D., 11, 27n44, 214n50
Joyce, James, 4, 124, 328
I nd ex
Kafka, Franz, 5, 79n14
Kaganov, Grigory, 14, 17
Kalyaev, Ivan, 53n33, 163, 170n13
Kandinsky,Wassily,19–20,84–120;andcolor
theory, 101, 103, 106, 119n56; and in-
ternal (inner) necessity, 91, 111–12; and
nature, 111; and spots, 85, 95, 104–7, 110,
110–11; and synesthesia, 86, 96–97
Kandinsky, Wassily, paintings: Black Spot, 107,
110; Diagonal Tensions and Countertensions
with a Point, 98; Lady in Moscow, 104–7,
105; The Last Judgment, 91; Moscow, 103–4,
104, 111
Kandinsky, Wassily, writings: Blue Rider, 91,
115n7, 116n23; “Content and Form,” 91;
“On the Question of Form,” 91, 116n23;
“On the Spiritual in Art,” 20, 90–91,
96–97, 107, 118n48; “Reminiscences,”
84, 87–88, 107, 111
Kardovsky, Dmitry, 115n14
Khlebnikov, Velemir, 114n7
Khodasevich, Vladislav, 27n49, 35–36,
260n48, 308, 320
Kobak, Alexander, 331
Kolnai, Aurel, 80n31
Komissarzhevskaya, Vera, 176–78, 192n7, 295
Konchalovsky, Pyotr, 115n8
Koretskaya, I. V., 113n1, 114n7
Korolenko, Vladimir, 267–69, 274, 281n16
Kruchyonykh, Alexei, 41, 88, 115n7
Kublitskaya-Piottukh, Anna Andreevna (Blok’s
mother), 308, 309, 319, 322n12
Kugel, Alexander, 174
Kulbin, Nikolay, 115n7
Kuzmin, Mikhail, 22, 80n28, 176–78, 180, 194–
98, 204–11, 298, 300, 318–19; “At the
Theatre” (V teatre), 177; “The Card-
board House” (Kartonnyi domik), 180;
“High Window” (Vyskoe okno), 211
Landow, George, 330
Lang, Susan, 250
language: grammar: and “suddenly” (Peters-
burg), 42–48, 50, 53n339, 66; and homo-
sexual subculture, 209; and sewing, 248–
50, 255; and urban experience, 124, 130;
and walking (see Certeau, Michel de). See
also narrative; tropes
Lavrov, Alexander, 32–33, 51n13, 82n55
Lefebvre, Henri, 7, 25n21, 28n54
In d ex
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (Laocoön), 74
Lillington, Karlin, 328
Ljunggren, Magnus, 80n28
Lukács, Georg, 11, 145
Lukomsky, Georgy, 12
Lurye, Arthur, 319
Lurye, Felix, 340n7
Maguire, Robert, and John Malmstad, 5, 20,
24n13, 28, 50n3, 116n28, 118n48, 224,
228–29, 236n29, 328
Malevich, Kazimir, 119n57
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 88, 112
Malmstad, John, and Nikolai Bogomolov, 207,
214n46, 215n52. See also Maguire, Robert
Mandelshtam, Osip, 27n44, 138, 144, 188; The
Egyptian Stamp (Egipetskaia marka), 125, 137–
39, 143, 289; “The End of the Novel” 136;
The Noise of Time (Shum vremeni ), 192n7
maps and mapping, 3, 7–10, 12–13, 27–28n52,
94–95, 131, 136, 139, 141, 195, 198–99,
219; and digital maps, 280, 327–28; and
homosexual subculture, 208–9; and Map-
ping Petersburg (Web site), 125, 141, 279–80,
301, 327–31; and terrorist plotting, 151–57,
161–69, 171n18
Marx, Karl, 6, 26n29, 249
masquerade/masks, 22, 33, 175, 178–85, 182–
83, 187–91, 246
material culture, 6–7, 21; as byproducts of the
bull, 266; furniture, 296; sewing machine
(Singer), 22, 238–40, 242–51, 256, 258n8,
258nn10–11, 258n16, 259n23; tram, 127–
33. See also commercial life; industrial life
Matich, Olga, 216n71, 260n46, 269–71
Matyushin, Mikhail, 48, 295, 300
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 48, 79n19, 88, 114n5,
114n7, 134, 146n33, 274–75, 295, 300,
308, 322n13
McDonough, Tom, 165
Medtner, Emil, 5, 25n13
Meltser, Fyodor, 295–96
Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 116n26
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 10, 149
Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 174, 176, 187
Mikhaylov, Mikhail, 248
Milashevsky, Vladimir, 294
Miller, D. A., 35
Miller, J. Hillis, 250
Miller, William Ian, 64, 68, 70, 75, 80n31
349
Mintslov, Sergey, R., 239, 257n5
Mitrokhin, Dmitry, 142, 285–86, 297–301, 299,
304n39
modernism, 3–120 passim; and aesthetics, 10,
19–20, 37, 62, 77, 83–113 passim, 256, 266–
79 (see also aesthetics; perspective); and
dissolution of form, 5, 10, 15, 19, 46, 55–
57, 83–133 passim; and modernity, 5, 11,
125, 262–79; and postmodernism, 16–17,
327; and selfhood, 144, 153, 155; and split-
ting the atom, 86–88
modernity: and “anti-modernity,” 287–88, 301;
and mastery of vision, 14 (see also panoptic
vision); and mechanization/built infra-
structure, 7, 125, 127–28, 158, 217–18, 239,
242–48, 263–66; and political terrorism,
18, 149–69; and shock, 5–7, 9, 17, 37, 27,
278–80, 327; and time, 217–18, 251, 273.
See also city; commercial life; industrial life
modes of transport, 157, 160, 220; automobile,
7, 123, 160, 241; carriage/horse-drawn
cab, 35, 39, 99, 149–50, 158, 160–63,
172n37; railroad, 158–59; tram/streetcar,
123–44, 172n30, 241, 288–89, 294, 317,
329. See also strolling/walking
Mondrian, Piet, 90, 117n33
Monet, Claude (The Haystack), 84, 96, 110–12,
115n8, 115n12, 120n76
Monmonier, Mark, 153
Montferrand, Auguste de, 222
Moss, Eric Owen, 334–35, 335
Munch, Edvard (The Scream), 70, 71, 73, 81n40,
81n42, 82n45, 111
Munnich, Burchard Christof von, 337
Munt, Evgeniya, 177, 187
music, 83–84; and abstract art/motion, 95–97,
117n38; and sounds of modern city, 123–
24, 135, 202, 248, 271–72; and synesthesia,
84, 86, 87. See also Petersburg: and music
Mussorgsky, Modest, 259n24
myth (Greek), 224, 250. See also Petersburg: and
Petersburg myth/text
Nabokov, Vladimir, 4–5, 27n44, 129, 143
narrative, 6, 137, 139, 141–44, 217–19, 230, 267,
270–71; fragmented, 9, 17–18, 39, 42, 124,
144, 252–53, 269, 271, 274, 327, 329–31;
and motion (walking/transport), 125, 139,
157, 199; omniscient, 35–39, 44; and sew-
ing, 242, 250–52, 256; spatialization of,
350
narrative (continued )
17–18, 20, 36–37, 39, 43–44, 49, 55–56,
61, 76, 84, 124, 139, 167, 195, 218, 250–51,
327–28. See also hypertextuality; Petersburg;
time
Newhall, Beaumont, 277
Nicholas I, 28, 257n4, 337, 341n10
Nicholas II, 181–82, 182, 217–20, 223, 235n22,
239
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49, 83, 86–87; Birth of
Tragedy, 5; Ecce Homo, 9, 88
novel: crisis/end of, 23, 136, 136–37, 139, 144–
45, 231; detective novel, 9, 33–34, 45, 48;
family novel, 77; spatialization of, 8–9,
17–18, 20, 36–37, 39, 43–44, 49, 55–56,
61, 76, 84; urban narrative, 9–11. See also
Petersburg
Nussbaum, Martha, 66–67, 75–76, 80n31
Ober, Artemy, 240
occult, 69–70, 83, 91, 94, 204; and astral
body, 93, 107; and inner sound, 91, 95,
107; and sounding cosmos/substance,
94–95, 117n32; and theosophy/anthro-
posophy, 86, 90–91, 106, 112, 117n32
Olesha, Yury, 274–75
Otsup, Nikolay, 133, 241
Pachmuss, Temira, 170n12, 253
painting, 8, 10, 19, 39, 56–57, 83–113. See also
Bely, Andrey; Cezanne, Paul; Kandin-
sky, Wassily; Munch, Edvard; Picasso,
Pablo; Rozanova, Olga
panoptic vision, 8, 13, 18, 43–44, 195, 240; and
The Bronze Horseman, 15, 46. See also Pe-
tersburg: and surveillance/detection
Paris, 6, 13, 36, 118n45, 128, 132, 191, 218–21,
224, 234, 237, 293; Alexander III Bridge,
22, 218–22, 224, 233n12, 235n23; Eiffel
Tower, 14
Pasternak, Boris, 4, 48, 322n13
Patyk, Lynn Ellen, 156, 171n16, 172n43
perspective: aerial/bird’s eye view, 8, 13–15,
46, 48, 73, 242; and affect (disgust), 55,
57, 61, 63–64, 76; and movement, 133–
34, 157–58, 161; panorama, 4, 9, 13–14,
16, 22, 26n30, 100, 133, 161, 195–99,
203–5, 210–11, 214n41, 236n33, 240;
street level, 8, 15, 17, 20, 22, 48, 205,
211, 241–42; and (un)readability, 15,
I nd ex
48–49, 57, 61, 76, 195. See also panoptic
vision; Petersburg
Peter II, 336
Peter the Great, 3, 14, 125, 181, 223, 227, 246,
332–34, 336
Petersburg, 3–20, 31–120 passim, 123–24, 156,
160, 165, 168, 170n8, 172n43, 238, 251–
53, 255, 271–72, 284, 296, 301n2, 324n70;
alternative titles for, 93, 160, 172n36, 197;
bomb in (see bomb); The Bronze Horseman
in, 46–47, 64–65, 90, 96, 228; cerebral
play in (see tropes); and Chesterton, 32,
34, 49, 50n8; as detective novel, 9, 33–
34, 45; and disgust, 55–78; and double
agency, 39, 44–45; and geometry, 59, 83,
88, 99, 116n28, 117n39n41, 118n48, 125,
136; as Gesamtkunstwerk, 19, 83; homosex-
ual desire in, 47, 66, 69, 75, 81n37; and
metamorphosis (see tropes); and music,
19, 77, 83–84, 271–72; and narrative, 5,
9, 17–18, 20, 22, 35–37, 39, 42–43, 48,
50, 95, 123–24, 253 (see also time); and
painting, 39, 44, 83–113; and perspective
(close-up/distance, aerial/street-level),
14, 18, 20, 48–49, 61, 63–64, 76, 95–96,
100–101, 107, 118n51; and phantasma-
goria, 6, 10, 15, 20, 46, 99–100, 156, 225,
284; and the reader, 18, 39, 43, 45, 48,
61, 63, 74; spatial epistemology of, 17, 20,
36, 39, 43–44, 46, 48–49, 56, 63, 76, 95,
100–101, 107, 327; and spots, 73, 85, 94–
95, 100, 101, 118n41; and “suddenly” (see
language); and surveillance/detection,
36, 38–39, 42–49; synecdoche in (see
body); terrorist conspiracy in, 18, 35–36,
150–51; tropes in (see tropes); unreadabil-
ity in, 15, 36–37, 48–49, 67
Petersburg: and floods, 198, 212n13, 333–34,
340n2; and Petersburg myth/text, 3, 10–
12, 14, 16–17, 19, 23, 42, 53n37, 65, 103,
132, 176, 187, 190, 196, 198, 200, 210, 307–
8, 332–40
Petersburg, buildings: Admiralty, 14, 28n52,
127, 238, 257; House of Books, 4, 41, 257;
House of Singer, 4, 22, 133, 238–42, 248,
256–57, 257n4, 257n7, 258n20; Kazan
Cathedral, 239; Komissarzhevsky Thea-
ter, 22, 174, 177, 186; Mariinsky Theater,
319, 334, 335; slaughterhouse, 16, 22,
79n22, 262–66; St. Isaac’s Cathedral, 14,
In d ex
26n30, 28n52, 65, 214n41; Winter Palace,
181, 189, 239, 337–38
Petersburg, bridges: Chernyshev Bridge, 185;
Kamennoostrovsky Bridge, 288; Liteyny
Bridge, 233n8; Nikolaevsky Bridge, 26n30,
27n52, 45, 129, 227–29, 319; Palace (Dvor-
tsovy) Bridge, 136; Troitsky (Trinity)
Bridge, 22, 132, 142, 217–32, 232n1, 232n4;
Warsaw Bridge, 164
Petersburg, canals: Catherine, 238, 240, 292;
Obvodny, 22, 149, 164, 262, 264
Petersburg, locales: Admiralty Side, 336–37;
Bronze Horseman, 14–15, 26n30, 45–47,
64, 132–33, 228, 334; Mars Field, 127,
186; Peski, 200–201; Petersburg/Petro-
grad Side, 127, 187, 219, 229–30, 233n8,
284–89, 293, 295, 298, 300, 303n23;
PetersburgUniversity,135–36,289;Sen-
ate Square, 14–15, 46, 127; Smolensk
Cemetery, 22, 306, 309, 319; Summer
Garden, 59, 60, 200, 204, 208; Tauride
Gardens, 195, 197, 199–202, 201, 204,
208–9;VasilievskyIsland,26n30,52n27,
127, 129, 133, 135–36, 189, 216n73, 228,
289, 306, 319, 324n70, 336
Petersburg, rivers: Karpovka, 16, 23, 283–301,
290, 299; Monastyrka, 128; Neva, 15, 20,
22, 65, 76, 80n34, 127, 132–33, 197,
204, 225–26, 228, 236n29, 296, 313, 319,
332–33, 337–38, 340; Okhta, 197, 338,
340; Pryazhka, 313, 317–18
Petersburg, streets: Bolshoy Prospect, 129, 289;
Kamennoostrovsky Prospect, 137, 284,
287–89, 295–96; Nevsky Prospect, 4, 7–8,
11, 20, 27n52, 37, 67–68, 99–101, 119n57,
133–36, 140, 144, 199, 215n62, 238–39,
241, 249, 284–86, 331n5; Ofitserskaya
Street, 174, 176, 186–87, 313–14, 317–19,
322n12; Tavricheskaya Street, 197, 203
Picasso, Pablo, 19, 28n60, 83, 116n23
Pilnyak, Boris, 4, 20, 274
Piottukh, F. F., 289
Pisacane, Carlo, 152
Plato, 49
Platonov, Andrey, 4, 276–77
Plehve, Vyacheslav von, 21, 33, 149–51, 153–
55, 157–58, 161–64, 169n1, 169n3, 170n6,
170n8, 170n13, 171n15, 171n20, 330
Poe, Edgar Allan (“The Man of the Crowd”),
15, 27n49, 36–37, 48, 53n33
351
Potyomkin, Grigory, 200
Proust, Marcel, 4–5, 251, 259n36
Przybyszewski, Stanislaw, 73
Pushkin, Alexander, 10, 15, 27n49, 222–23,
234n18; Boris Godunov, 181; Bronze Horse-
man (Mednyi vsadnik ), 10, 14, 26n35
Pyast, Vladimir, 290–91, 318–19
Rabelais, François, 68, 79n15
Rastrelli, Francesco Bartolomeo, 338
revolution: of 1905, 6, 17, 53n34, 59, 88, 101,
124, 156, 185, 193n17, 207, 214n52; of
1917, 3, 15, 114n5, 140, 202, 274, 279–80,
300, 305–6, 315–16
Reynolds, Dee, 112
Reytblat, Abram, 34
Rickert, Heinrich, 24
Rimbaud, Arthur, 222
Ringbom, Sexton, 94–94, 119n59
Robakidze, Grigory (Grigol), 27n51
Rozanov, Vasily, 52n17, 144–45, 298
Rozanova, Olga, 41, 42, 88
Rylkova, Galina, 316
Sabashnikova, Margarita, 210
Sapunov, Nikolay, 115n16, 176
Sarabyanov, Dmitry, 107
Savina, Maria, 295
Savinkov, Boris, 21, 33, 53n39, 149–73
Sazonov, Egor, 150, 160, 163–65, 169n3, 170n8
Schelling, Friedrich, 91
Schenker, Alexander M., 80n24
Schönberg, Arnold, 86
Scriabin, Alexander, 86
seamstress and sewing, 22, 248–51, 254–56. See
also female sphere; language; material
culture; narrative
secret police (Okhrana), 35, 38, 166–67; double
agent, 9, 33, 35–36, 39, 43–44, 62, 69,
95, 159
sewing machine (Singer). See material culture
Shaginyan, Marietta, 318, 323n47
Shklovsky, Viktor, 4, 8, 20, 25n23, 42, 48, 124,
129–30, 136, 142, 144–45, 270, 318, 320–
21, 324n48
Sholokhov, Mikhail, 276
Shvarsalon, Vera, 210, 214n42, 216n73
Simmel, Georg, 5, 20, 24n13, 46, 52n27, 56,
91, 194–95, 236n27, 327; correspondence
with Heinrich Rickert, 24n13
352
Skovoroda, Grigory, 50, 77, 82n55
Soja, Edward, 7–8, 16, 28n54, 43
Sologub, Fyodor, 176, 260n48, 305, 312
Somov, Konstantin, 81n43, 113n1, 176, 215n59,
298, 318
space: chronotope, 43, 250–51, 256, 283; and
contiguity, 7; framing, 133–34, 241; and
modernist aesthetics (see narrative;
novel; perspective; Petersburg); private
(apartment), 69, 178, 191, 197–98, 202–
5, 209, 290–91, 294. See also city; maps
and mapping; time
Steel, Valerie, 297
Steiner, Rudolf, 82n44, 86, 90, 94, 115n15,
119n58
Stepun, Fyodor, 25n13, 32
Stites, Richard, 278
strolling/walking, 156–58, 163, 176, 186, 190–
91, 195, 198–99, 204–5, 208–9, 211, 283–
301. See also flâneur/flânerie
Struve, Mikhail, 308
Stuck, Franz von, 113n1, 115n13
Sudeykin, Sergey, 115n16, 176–78
surveillance, 156–57, 161–66. See also panoptic
vision; Petersburg
Syuzor, Pavel, 239
Tatlin, Vladimir, 114n7
terrorism: in Chicago, 51n13; in London, 33–
34; in Russia (Petersburg), 5, 31, 33–35,
88, 95, 149–73, 292
time, 7, 19, 23, 42–44, 50, 70, 97, 123–24, 217–
18, 250–51; frozen/retrospective, 287,
292, 300–301; simultaneity, 7, 20, 44,
125, 132, 188, 267, 280; and spatializa-
tion, 17–18, 43–44, 46–48, 66, 84, 95,
124, 132, 155
Timenchik, Roman, 32, 131, 139, 141
Tolstoy, Lev, 269, 275, 280, 281n20; Anna Kare-
nina, 139, 270, 277; “First Step” (Pervaia
stupen’), 269, 271; “Sevastopol Stories,”
270; What Is Art?, 269
tropes: bomb (see bomb); bridge, 217–32; cere-
bral play, 17–18, 38–39, 42–43, 52n25,
66, 90–91, 93, 136, 184–85; displacement
(sdvig), 35–36, 39, 47–48, 66; metamor-
phosis, 47, 55, 64, 67, 70, 81n39, 94, 101;
palindrome/anagram, 46, 69–70; sewing,
242, 250–52, 256; slaughter, 262–79;
swarm, 8–9, 19, 25n23, 37, 99, 118n45,
I nd ex
226–27, 284, 327; synecdoche (back) (see
body); tram, 139–40
Tsivian, Yuri, 7, 32
Tsvetaeva, Marina, 255, 260n50, 298
Turchin, Valery, 119n64
Turgenev, Ivan (Smoke), 249
Vaginov, Konstantin, 4
Vaillant, Auguste, 88
Valéry, Paul, 230, 233n5
Vengerova, Zinaida, 253
Verigina, Valentina, 177–79, 187–91
Vertov, Dziga, 134, 277, 278
Vision. See cinema/cinematic vision; gaze;
panoptic vision; perspective; Petersburg;
surveillance
Vladimirov, Vasily V., 85
Volokhova, Natalya, 176, 179–80, 185–87,
189
Voloshin, Maximilian, 210
Vyaltseva, Anastasia, 295, 300
Wagner, Richard, 86
Wanner, Adrian, 285
war: Civil War, 140, 262, 274, 305–8, 313;
First World War, 3, 39, 255–56, 261n53,
279, 300, 338, 340; Russo-Japanese War,
17, 256; Second World War (Leningrad
Blockade), 4, 143
Web sites: Alexander Palace Time Machine, 330–
31; Mapping Petersburg, xi, 23, 118n55,
125, 142, 145, 146n32, 193n22, 212n12,
214n41, 215n64, 250, 258n11, 259n22,
280, 294, 304n37, 327–31, 331n5; Saint
Petersburg Encyclopedia, 331
Weiss, Peg, 117n32
Wells, H. G., 150
Werefkin, Nina von, 115n14
West, Rebecca, 51n13
World of Art (group), 11, 297, 299–300,
335
Yudina, Ekaterina, 308
Zabolotsky, Nikolay, 241
Zamyatin, Evgeny, 4, 308, 311–12, 319, 321
Zinovieva-Annibal, Lidiya, 176, 196–97, 204,
210, 213n32, 216n69
Zola, Emile, 51n13
Zorgenfrey, Wilhelm, 314–15, 318–19