Aphasia in Andrei Bely's Petersburg

Abstract: This essay is interested in how a novel behaves when it has been theorized out of existence by its own creator. I take as my case study the novel Petersburg , whose author, the prominent Russian modernist Andrei Bely, criticized the arts (including the art of literature) on ethical grounds. I argue that the tension between Bely's theory and his practice manifests in his text as a form of aphasia, or impaired speech. Reading Petersburg alongside Roman Jakobson's writings on aphasia and Emmanuel Levinas's conception of aesthetics, I argue that the novel yields insight into the behavior of the medium that is conscious of its own ethical limits.