No unified Ableukhov: orientalism and imperialism in Andrei Bely's Petersburg.

This project brings into dialogue the 1913 Russian novel Petersburg by Andrei Bely and postcolonial approaches to literature, primarily those developed by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1994). Petersburg was the product of an artistic movement, Symbolism, that idealized breaking apart boundaries between artforms. Said’s notion of Orientalism, in contrast, is based on the idea that there is an essential division between “East” and “West.” While there might appear to be a tension in applying a theory premised on division to a work that apparently wants to dissolve all boundaries, attention to Petersburg’s depiction of race and empire reveals the extent to which these apparently crucial divisions stand in the way of the Symbolist movement’s idealized unity. By connecting postcolonial literary theory to a novel that has been more widely studied for its artistic and philosophical innovations, I will demonstrate how reading through the lenses of Orientalism and imperialism is crucial to understanding both Petersburg and Russian literature at large.