So Bely invented his oddly abstract pseudonym. To the bourgeoisie who knew his parents – like, for instance, Marina Tsvetayeva’s aunt – it only sounded uncouth:

‘… the worst of it is that he comes from a respectable family, he’s a professor’s son, Nikolai Dmitrievich Bugaev’s. Why not Boris Bugaev? But Andrei Bely? Disowning your own father? It seems they’ve done it on purpose. Are they ashamed to sign their own names? What sort of White? An angel or a madman who jumps out into the street wearing his underwear?’4

Tsvetayeva herself, however, adored Bely’s abstract example. But then, Tsvetayeva was a young poet, who loved Bely’s bravura. Bely, writes Tsvetayeva, was always trying to escape the ordinary real: he ‘was visibly on the point of take-off, of departure’ – and his ‘basic element’ was ‘flight’: ‘his native and terrible element of empty spaces’.5 His pseudonym, therefore, was just another way of turning things upside down.

Every pseudonym is subconsciously a rejection of being an heir, being a descendant, being a son. A rejection of the father. And not only a rejection of the father, but likewise of the saint under whose protection one was placed, and of the faith into which one was baptized, and of one’s own childhood, and of the mother who called him Borya and didn’t know any ‘Andrei’, a rejection of all roots, whether ecclesiastical or familial. Avant moi le déluge! I – am I.6

The self was an invention, and so was a city. Everything was fictional. This was the premise of Petersburg, at the start of the twentieth century.

Petersburg

Andrei Bely’s novel called Petersburg appeared in three issues of the magazine Sirin in 1913 and 1914: in 1916 it appeared as a book.

As for its plot: its plot is about a plot. Roughly, this plot takes place over a week or so in Petersburg at the beginning of October in 1905 – just before the General Strike.

A senator, called Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, has a son: Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov. Nikolai, unhappy in love, unhappy in life and a student of the philosophy of Kant, has promised to help the revolutionary cause. An obscure adherent to this revolutionary cause delivers to him a package, wrapped in a cloth printed with a design of pheasants, for safe keeping. It turns out that this package is a sardine tin, and the sardine tin conceals a bomb – which Nikolai is then ordered to throw at his own father.

This is the basic plot. It follows the ordering and possible execution of a revolutionary conspiracy. This conspiracy links the various islands of Petersburg: the dive bars and the mansions. But really, of course, these facts are not important. For Petersburg is a city whose true form is infinity: its streets are endless.

There is an infinity of prospects racing in infinity with an infinity of intersecting shadows racing into infinity. All Petersburg is the infinity of a prospect raised to the power of n.

While beyond Petersburg there is – nothing. (p. 19)

And so the real investigation of this novel cannot be into the contours of a plot. The plot recedes in the infinity of the city. The real plot is the movement of Bely’s sentences. Or, in other words, the plot is simply a pretext for Bely to investigate how language might determine what we habitually, and mistakenly, think of as the real.

Reality

According to Petersburg, reality is multi-levelled: like an infinite car park. Yes, this novel is set within the perspective of the infinite; and so its style flickers between the almost-mystic and the almost-materialist – so that this is how a man is described, standing in a candlelit room:

Lippanchenko stopped in the middle of the dark room with the candle in his hand; the shadowy shoals stopped together with him; the enormous shadowy fat man, Lippanchenko’s soul, hung head down from the ceiling … (p. 531)

There is the world of sensation, true: but behind this is everything else. ‘ “… one must admit that we do not live in a visible world …”,’ a hallucination tells a character. ‘ “The tragedy of our situation is that we are, like it or not, in an invisible world …” ’ (p. 408).