Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T16:41:39.992Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely's Petersburg

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jacob Emery
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 76 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Theodor, Adorno. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge, 1973.Google Scholar
Alexandrov, Vladimir E. Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aristotle. On Poetry and Style. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Lib. of Liberal Arts, 1958.Google Scholar
Monroe, Beardsley. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, 1958.Google Scholar
Andrej, Belyj. Glossolalie: Poem über den Laut. Eng. trans. Thomas R. Beyer, Jr. Dornach, Switz.: Pforte, 2003.Google Scholar
Andrej, Belyj. . 2 vols. Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1994.Google Scholar
Andrej, Belyj. Ha . Moskva: Xudožestvennaja literatura, 1989.Google Scholar
Andrej, Belyj. . Moskva: Respublika, 1994.Google Scholar
Andrej, Belyj. Petersburg. Trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.Google Scholar
Andrej, Belyj. Petersburg. Trans. David McDuff. London: Penguin, 1995.Google Scholar
Andrej, Belyj. Selected Essays of Andrei Bely. Ed. and trans. Cassedy, Steven. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.Google Scholar
Nikolaj, Berdjaev. “.” Burlaka 411–18.Google Scholar
Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. 2 vols. Point Loma: Aryan Theosophical, 1919.Google Scholar
Burlaka, D. K., ed. : Pro et Contra. Sankt Peterburg: Russkogo Gumanitarnogo Instituta, 2004.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Elsworth, J. D. Andrei Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robin, Fox. Encounter with Anthropology. New York: Dell, 1965.Google Scholar
Northrop, Frye. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.Google Scholar
Paul, Gordon. The Critical Double: Figurative Meaning in Aesthetic Discourse. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995.Google Scholar
Herodotus. The History. Trans. David Grene. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.Google Scholar
Holy Bible. Authorized King James Vers. Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1984.Google Scholar
Ivanov, Vjačeslav Ivanovič. “:.” Burlaka 401–10.Google Scholar
Gerald, Janecek. “Rhythm in Prose: The Special Case of Bely.” Andrey Bely: A Critical Review. Ed. Janecek. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1978. 86–102.Google Scholar
Jacques, Lacan. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1997.Google Scholar
Timothy, Langen. The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely's Petersburg. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic, 1963.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The View from Afar. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss. New York: Basic, 1985.Google Scholar
Magnus, Ljunggren. The Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj's Novel Peterburg. Stockholm: Almqvist, 1982.Google Scholar
Lotman, Jurij M. “. Ed. Stanislav Lesnevskii and Aleksandr Alekseevich Mikhailov. Moskva: Sovetskij pisatel', 1988. 437–43.Google Scholar
Maguire, Robert A., and John, E. Malmstad. Introduction. Belyj, Petersburg (1978) viii–xxvii.Google Scholar
McHale, Brian. Postmodern Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.Google Scholar
Georges, Perec. W; or, The Memory of Childhood. Trans. David Bellos. Boston: Godine, 1988.Google Scholar
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford UP, 1936.Google Scholar
Paul, Ricoeur. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1979.Google Scholar
Viktor, Shklovsky. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive, 1990.Google Scholar
Standford, W. Bedell. Greek Metaphor: Studies in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell, 1936.Google Scholar
Mark, Turner. Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.Google Scholar
Virginia, Woolf. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 1955.Google Scholar
Eugene, Zamiatin. We. Trans. Natasha Randall. New York: Mod. Lib., 2006.Google Scholar