MATHEMATICS AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE OF THE SYSTEM OF CHARACTERS IN A. BELY’S NOVEL PETERSBURG

Abstract

The paper attempts to prove that mathematics is not just one of the keys to comprehending the conceptosphere of A. Bely’s novel Petersburg, but the basis of his poetics, including the character sphere. It is the mathematical approach to the ways of grouping characters, as well as to the types of psychological analysis, that ensures the compositional unity of the chaotic, ‘unassembled’, at fi rst sight, text. Th e ‘brain game’ of the characters and the author-narrator, which reveals the textgenerating algorithm of the novel and provides seemingly unlimited freedom to its creator, turns out to be a carefully adjusted ‘program’ based on a system of binary oppositions. A. Bely’s Petersburg, for all its ornamental ‘motleyness’, is one of the most well-ordered texts of Russian literature: random encounters and collisions of characters, their chaotic movements around the city, strange actions, as well as ‘disorderly’ thoughts, have a strict ‘mathematical foundation’. At the same time, the principle of binary oppositions as the organizing principle of the system of characters corresponds to the logic of the neo-mythological text, which is characterized by the mutual refl ection of characters into each other, as well as the division of a single ‘pro-hero’ into novel doubles. The philosophical ideas of Vyach. Ivanov, dating back to the teachings of the Pythagoreans and their interpretation of the monad and dyad (as the essence of Apollo and Dionysus), are correlated in the novel with the scientific discoveries of Professor N.V. Bugaev (arrhythmology, the doctrine of ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’). Moreover, it is emphasized that Bely’s interest in the categories of singularity and multiplicity, which sets the mathematically visual vector of perception of the text — and above all its system of characters — reveals a typological relationship with other areas of mathematical knowledge (in particular, with the Banach—Tarski paradox).