Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely's Petersburg

Abstract

Andrey Bely's novel Petersburg (one of the high points of Russian literary modernism and a rough analogue to James Joyce's Ulysses) repeatedly claims that parent and child, being of the same flesh and blood, share an ambivalent identity. At the same time, because the novel opens by invoking a major character's genealogical relation to Adam, the book implies that this kin identity is universal and can be applied to the entire human race. This essay analyzes the role of kinship metaphor in Petersburg, demonstrating that tropes of parent-child identity facilitate the novel's dizzying metaphoric conflation, that they form a kind of metafictional mirror in which the novel probes its own nature as a work of the imagination, and that Bely's theory and practice of metaphor touch on broader philosophical issues of figure and fictionality.