And so the visible world can suddenly dissolve, within a sentence, into another world entirely – ‘a world of figures, contours, shimmerings, strange physical sensations’ (p. 181).

‘Like a race of people divided into those with long heads and those with short heads,’ commented the revolutionary critic Viktor Shklovsky, in the city that was now Leningrad, writing on Bely, ‘the Symbolist movement was split down the middle by an old controversy. Essentially, it involved the following question: Was Symbolism merely an aesthetic method or was it something more?’: ‘All of his life, Bely championed the second alternative (i.e., that Symbolism is much more than just art).’7

But I’m not quite sure that Shklovsky is accurate. Because it’s true that in his frenetic and haphazard career Bely took up with the Symbolists, and then with the spiritualists, and even the anthroposophists. He was into Kant, and Schopenhauer, and Rudolf Steiner. But this list is only a list of crazes. It indicates a roving interest in flight, in emigration from the ordinary categories: not a sustained mystical vision. The philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev, who was a genuine mystic, was one of Bely’s mentors. And Berdyayev had his doubts about the thoroughness of Bely’s thinking. ‘Bely knew very little,’ wrote Berdyayev, ‘and what he knew was confused and incoherent.’8

Rather than the detail of the temporary visible world, Bely preferred its more permanent abstractions: the Cube, the Sphere and the Swarm. With these categories, he described the fluid transitions of reality. But there’s no need to be a mystic to believe that reality is fluid. Even the most empirical of philosophers has been unable to prove that an objective world exists. Our knowledge of reality is never direct. There is an idealism hidden in every realism. And this fluidity of the material world is what Bely loved exploring.*

If a sardine tin can also be a bomb, for instance, then all objects are revealed as potentially ambiguous. Their solidity evaporates: ‘ “they’re what they are – and yet different …” ’ This is one effect in Petersburg of the panic of a revolutionary conspiracy. Another conspirator tries to offer a rational explanation: this slippage in reality is only a ‘pseudo-hallucination’: ‘ “a kind of symbolic sensation that does not correspond to the stimulus of a sensation” ’ (pp. 359, 360).

And I think: but this is really a description of language! That is the coded subject, after all, of Bely’s novel. Language is what creates a symbolic sensation that doesn’t correspond to an actual sensation. Language is what constitutes the disturbing fragility of the real.

In an essay of 1909 called ‘The Magic of Words’, Bely wrote that the ‘original victory of consciousness lies in the creation of sound symbols. For in sound there is recreated a new world within whose boundaries I feel myself to be the creator of reality.’9 The new reality of language is Bely’s constant subject. For he was expert at dissolving the binary oppositions of ordinary philosophy. Everyone knows, say, that a sign is made up of a signifier and a signified: an outer form and an inner content. Only Bely would think that in constructing a sign he might ‘surmount two worlds’ – the inner and the outer. ‘Neither of these worlds is real. But the THIRD world exists.’10

This extra world of the sign is what is investigated in Petersburg – and I mean investigation. This novel is a system of parallel investigations into the minute moments where words materialize as a version of reality.

Words

In Paris, twenty years earlier, in his text called ‘Crise de vers’, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé had outlined the inverted reality that language could produce:

I say: a flower! and, beyond the oblivion to which my voice consigns any outline, being something other than the known calyxes, musically rises an idea itself and sweet, the one absent from every bouquet.11

And Bely knew about this philosophy of the poetic word. But a novel offered more complicated demonstrations. And so in Petersburg he closed the first chapter of Petersburg with a small essay in literary theory.