Peter and the Walrus, or Petersburg at the Limits of Intertextuality

Abstract

Intertextual analysis is a stock‐in‐trade of Russian modernist studies, especially when it comes to high modernism, bent as it was on countering the vague suggestiveness of the early modernist discourse with another kind of allusiveness that similarly relied on active readership but demoted metaphysical speculation in favor of cultural erudition manifest in the reader's ability to position a literary text within a network of verbal, visual, or musical artifacts. Andrei Bely's Petersburg (1913) exemplifies this practice. Yet there comes a time when newly identified subtexts fail to enrich our understanding of the novel, thereby testing the limits of intertextual interpretation as an analytical method deaf to cultural knowledge that is not formally codified and, by this token, is less accessible to latter‐day readers than to modernist artists and their interpretive communities. This essay explores obscene humor as one such presently invisible aspect of Petersburg. The identification and interpretation of the bawdy in the novel are predicated on the reader's familiarity with the lowest discursive register of Bely's day, a register whose taboo nature hinders cultural codification, defying the tried‐and‐true tools of intertextual analysis. Pushing the limits of intertextuality, Petersburg's bawdiness reflects the epistemological crisis of Russian modernism transitioning between its historical iterations. A veteran of the post‐1905 polemics in the modernist cultural community, Bely ridicules in Petersburg the values and ideals he still holds dear, better to safeguard them from the neophytes of “new art,” who mock the metaphysical bent of early modernism, and from its epigones, who devalue these metaphysics by inflationary overuse. Reviving the practice of romantic irony, Bely at once codifies and ridicules his innermost aspirations, following Vladimir Solovyov's example.