The Real St. Petersburg

Abstract

The Petersburg myth is essentially myth of duality-and the key element in larger system of cultural dualities. Though there are many reasons for the existence of such system, without the fact of St. Petersburg I doubt we would understand what Berdiaev is talking about when he dubs his compatriots a people in the highest degree polarized.' Readers of Russian novels are only too familiar with such sentiments; but for scholars the duality of Petersburg and Russia as whole remains an awkward premise, partly because of our prejudice against the romantic notion of national character, and partly because of our poststructuralist misgivings about undeconstructed binary oppositions. We cannot forget Derrida's dismantling of Levi-Strauss-whose pairings turn out to camouflage the ideological privileging of one side over the other.2 Thus the wistful ambivalence with which Vyacheslav Ivanov introduces the latest edition of Vladimir Paperny's influential Kul'tura Dva (a binary-opposition-fest if there ever was one, with chapter headings such as Horizontal Vertical, Collective Individual, Lyric Epic, and so on). Avoiding overt criticism, this leader of Soviet-era structuralism simply acknowledges Paperny's partiality for polar opposites (poliarnye protivopolozhnosti) ('binary oppositions' [binarnye oppozitsii], as we most reverently referred to them at that time when it was precisely in them that we saw the chief fascination of structuralism).3 Be that as it may, there is nothing new in the idea of subverting the classic oppositions of Russian culture (East/West, Moscow/Petersburg, serf/gentry, pagan/Christian, and so on). Derrida has nothing to teach Andrei Belyi, for example. Both are pupils of Nietzsche, who in his Twilight of the Idols tolls the funeral bell for Platonic idealism, for the basic opposition between the world of appearances and that of higher reality. In his novel Petersburg, Belyi expands the Dostoevskian network of psychological, social, and metaphysical dualities to baroque extreme and correspondingly raises the reader's hope of