two urban experiences, however different, have been essential prerequisites to this discovery of true place.
Yet Tolstoi never allows us to forget that it is character which shapes place, and that place, so regarded, is relatively unimportant. An early version can be seen in The Cossacks (1863), where Olenin tires of the empty life of his fellow-aristocrats in Moscow (which is identical in this respect to Petersburg) and seeks authenticity among the "simple" folk of the Caucasus. But his preconceptions are too powerful; the quest is fruitless; and he ends up with no proper place at all. This is what happens to the heroine of Anna Karenina (1875-77). Both Petersburg and Moscow are treated contemptuously in this novel; the countryside is extolled as the spiritual and moral center of Russian life; but it is ultimately Anna's flaws of character that prevent her from making healthy choices, and doom her to disaster.
Around the turn of the century, fiction writers began to explore new themes, like industrialization, the rising middle class, business entrepre-neurship, and class warfare. Cities and towns were the preferred settings, and blacks and grays the preferred coloration, in the spirit of Dostoevskii and Gogol, but with an admixture of French Naturalists like Zola. These trends are generously represented in the works of Maksim Gorkii, especially in Mother (1906), his most famous and influential novel, which offers an adulatory account of the rising revolutionary movement in ways that left an indelible mark on all Soviet literature: it has rightly been called "the archetype of the socialist realist novel."10 Revolution also drives the plot of Andrei Belyi's Petersburg (first version in book form, 1916; revised, 1922), but that is all the two novels have in common. Gorkii's is propaganda; Belyi's is an ambitiously conceived and intricately woven work of art, which most readers of Russian literature have come to regard as the greatest urban novel of the twentieth century.
The story is set in 1905, when Petersburg, at nearly two million the largest city in the Russian Empire, stood at its height culturally, but was being racked by social unrest that would culminate in revolution. Belyi creates a tissue of detail that makes the city vividly present, indeed almost a character in its own right. In addition to climate, topography, architecture, and the famous streets and monuments, he brings in the great intellectual and cultural issues that engaged educated people, and the political discontents that knew no class boundaries. So particular are the events he describes that we can date the action of the novel, although he does not do so, as unfolding between 30 September and 9 October. It is on them that he builds his fictional plot. It moves linearly. But the lines intersect several great circles, which dip back into time past, ahead into an apocalyptic time
future, and even into an astral "fourth dimension." One consequence is the appearance in fictional present time of characters and events from Russian history. Peter the Great - man and equestrian statue - is the most important. Belyi also draws heavily from earlier Russian fiction, thereby reminding us how much of the identity of Petersburg has been created by writers. "Was that the shadow of a woman darting onto the little bridge to throw herself off?" the narrator asks at one point. "Was it Liza?" in an allusion to the heroine of Tchaikovsky's operatic version of Pushkin's story "The Queen of Spades" (1833). "No, just the shadow of a woman of Petersburg." But it could have been Liza too, in the world as Belyi arranges it. He not only makes no attempt to conceal his borrowings, but ensures that we see them too. This is very much in keeping with the Russian tradition of "literariness" {literaturnost'), which does not prize "originality" in the sense that most non-Russian Western cultures do. The character of the old senator, Apollon Apollonovich, is the richest beneficiary of this tradition, embodying as he does certain attributes of the god Apollo, after whom he is named, the greenish ears of Anna Karenina's husband, the devotion to bureaucratic drudgery of Gogol's Akakii Akake-vich, and the reactionary politics of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the real-life Procurator of the Holy Synod. Belyi also avails himself of much of the complex mythology that had grown up around the city by his time, with heavy doses of the Bible, Rudolf Steiner, and German philosophy. It finds forceful expression in the images of enclosure, East, and West, all of which are intertwined. Most particularly they are associated with Apollon Apollonovich. He regards Russia as a vast, threatening expanse, an "icy plain" that is "roamed by wolves," and is frightened by the rising tide of violence in the country, which he identifies not only with revolutionaries, but with "Eastern" elements variously defined as Mongolians and Turanians. These fears prompt him to seek refuge behind apparently secure enclosures, like Petersburg itself, the thick walls of his magnificent house, Comtean positivism, and the undeviating routines of domestic and official life. But everything he tries to exclude is either already present within any given enclosure, himself included, or gains easy access to it; and at any moment he can find himself whisked out of his rooms, his city, and his body into the fourth dimension.
What is true of Apollon holds for Belyi's novel at large. Nothing is clearly delineated; everything blends and blurs, so that conventional markers like "fact" and "fiction," "past" and "present" are ultimately meaningless. Even Belyi's system of language relies on polyvalence and ambiguity, as we might expect in a Symbolist writer. In these ways too, Petersburg reveals the presence of the same impulse that drove all the
Russian arts of the early twentieth century toward a conflation and synthesis of genres, styles, and materials. As a result, we are offered no reliable phenomenological world, no narrator who explains or even hints at the way things "really" are. By the end of the novel, characters, narrator, and readers find themselves in a state of confusion and puzzlement, much like readers of Gogol, Belyi's favorite writer. Nothing is left of those "great thoughts" which had originally created the city. Paradoxically, the most thoroughgoing novel ever written about Russia's capital city ends by writing Petersburg, and perhaps even Russia itself, out of existence. Belyi began work on a sequel to this novel, which was to be entitled The Invisible City. There, he said, he would no longer "rummage around in vileness," but would "depict wholesome and ennobling elements of 'Life and the Spirit.' "11 But it was never written, perhaps because wholesomeness and nobility are qualities conspicuously absent in earlier fictional treatments of St. Petersburg.
Much of the imagery of Petersburg, however, moved to other venues. One was Utopian societies, often highly technological, as in Aleksandr Bogdanov's Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1912). In early Soviet times, Aleksei Tolstoi's Aelita (1922-23) enjoyed wide popularity. It begins in a Petersburg ravaged by revolution and civil war, an "insane city" of empty, wind-swept streets, boarded-up buildings, and freezing interiors, like all of Russia at the time. No alternative being available, two committed urbanités, the scientists Los and Gusev, build a rocket ship and set out for Mars, where, amidst a desolate landscape, they come upon the magical, sparkling capital city of Soatsera. Unfortunately, it is controlled by an evil tyrant, Tuskub, who wants it annihilated, arguing - in what looks like a throwback to Sentimentalist anti-urbanism - that "the force that is destroying universal order - anarchy - emanates from the city. A laboratory for the preparation of drunkards, thieves, murderers, savage voluptuaries, ravaged souls - such is the city." It turns out, however, that Tuskub is interested merely in hanging on to power, and Gusev, intent on preserving this marvelous city, leads a band of rebels. He fails, and, with Los, escapes back to Petersburg. Four years have passed, and with them, a transformation has occurred: Petersburg has become "one of the really chic cities of Europe," no longer bleak and empty, but bustling and purposeful, with the Nevskii Prospect (in a look back perhaps at the landscape of Belyi's novel) "filled with people, flooded with light from a thousand windows, fiery letters, arrows, and revolving wheels above the roofs." What has made the difference is purposeful labor and a new technology. Los himself is now employed in a factory, where he is "building a multi-purpose engine of the Martian type. It was assumed that his engine would revolutionize the