In 1927 he had been expelled from the Party. He was soon readmitted, but was expelled again in 1932, and then readmitted a year later. This was the context of his terrified preface to Bely’s book. Historically, Kamenev was disappearing. In December 1934, after Bely had died, Kamenev was again expelled from the Party; this time, he was also arrested. Sentenced in 1935 to ten years in prison, he was retried in the first Moscow Show Trial in August 1936. He was found guilty and immediately shot.

This epilogue, however, is only a prologue. It is only Moscow – and so it is only the political version of reality’s multiple forms of disappearance. Whereas the more important story of Andrei Bely and his investigation into reality takes place in another Russian city, Petersburg – the city where Bely became famous. Petersburg was the pretext for his intricate novel called Petersburg – the city that Bely converted into a portable experiment with words.

Petersburg

But then, Petersburg was already an experiment. Before Bely, it had been invented as a problem by another great novelist: Nikolai Gogol. ‘Passing as it were through Gogol’s temperament,’ wrote Vladimir Nabokov, who loved both Gogol and Bely, ‘St Petersburg acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century …’2 In the mid-1830s, Gogol published a series of Petersburg stories: ‘Nevsky Prospekt’, ‘Nose’ and ‘Portrait’, followed in 1842 by ‘Coat’. In them, he developed the idea that this city called Petersburg was an experiment in what was real. It was built between land and water, its climate was fog, the water was undrinkable: and in this fluid atmosphere it was therefore difficult to tell what was real and what was not: ‘Oh, do not trust that Nevsky Prospect! I always wrap myself more closely in my cloak when I pass along it and try not to look at the objects that meet me. Everything is a cheat, everything is a dream, everything is other than it seems!’3

Petersburg – an exercise in unreality! Pure surface!* This was the city that Andrei Bely invented once again, in his novel called Petersburg.

In this melting greyness there suddenly dimly emerged a large number of dots, looking in astonishment: lights, lights, tiny lights filled with intensity and rushed out of the darkness in pursuit of the rust-red blotches, as cascades fell from above: blue, dark violet and black.

Petersburg slipped away into the night. (p. 198)

This was how to describe the city as a landscape: an abstract metamorphosis of dots. But maybe even this was too definite; maybe it only existed as a sign – a creation of cartographers:

… two little circles that sit one inside the other with a black point in the centre; and from this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it energetically declares that it exists: from there, from this point, there rushes in a torrent a swarm of the freshly printed book; impetuously from this invisible point rushes the government circular. (p. 4)

A city as a point, or dot: this is Andrei Bely’s initial act of revolution in his novel Petersburg. It is an invention with multiple effects. And the most important is outlined in this novel by a hallucinating terrorist, who is suddenly possessed by the knowledge that

‘Petersburg possesses not three dimensions, but four; the fourth is subject to obscurity and is not marked on maps at all, except as a dot, for a dot is the place where the plane of this existence touches against the spherical surface of the immense astral cosmos …’ (p. 409)

In other words: everything in this city is on the brink of meaning; everything in Petersburg is potentially a sign.

Names

Even, for instance, a novelist’s name. For Andrei Bely is a pseudonym. (Andrew White!) His initial name was Boris Bugayev.

The reason for this new name was sweetly chic. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bely was avant-garde. And the avant-garde he belonged to was Symbolism. The Symbolists believed in renewing literature through a renewed description of the real, and this description would encompass sound coding, synaesthesia, hieroglyphics: the whole alphabet of esoteric craziness. And so naturally a poet could not use his own name. The hipster had to hint at a purer truth.