Circular Imagery in Bely's Pet
Circular Imagery in Bely's PetersburgIn Petersburg, Andrei Bely thematically connects circular imagery with violence, rapid expansion, dismemberment, and especially explosions. This modernist representation of circles and orbs as objects of chaos and destruction prefigure both the explosion at the end of the book, and the apocalyptic explosion of revolution.Even before the reader is made aware of any explosive device or sinister scheme, Bely foreshadows both by combining images of Apollon Apollonovich's eyes and heart with a rapidly expanding sphere. After the reader's first encounter with cerebral play, Bely describes Apollon Apollonovich's daily carriage ride to work, in which he locks eyes with a pedestrian, who changes from ordinary silhouette to shining dot to an "immense crimson sphere" that rapidly flies at him . The reader immediately makes the connection to cerebral play but this vision is understood as a threat to Apollon Apollonovich, especially after talk of revolutionaries in Petersburg and the knowledge that Mr. Ableukhov holds an important position with the government . Following this startling vision, Apollon Apollonovich spots a pair of eyes on the street that
" Bely states that without the one ahead of them, all the zeroes would simply fall out and become meaningless but that means that the one has to somehow be removed. Only the bomb and their revulsion to it connect them, and connect them at the heart no less. The overwhelming circular image at the end of Petersburg, the zero, begins life as a feeling of ominous dread and later becomes itself an explosion that leaves only itself in its wake. Bely affirms this with the arrival of Anna Petrovna, where he states that experience grows instantaneously or not at all . Nikolai's zeroes utterly decimated him and left in their wake a different entity. " When Nikolai Apollonovich is finally broken, he experiences a "zero sensation. " Bely conjures up explosive imagery both by describing it and by linking it to individual body parts severed from the whole, as if they were scattered in an explosion and now stand apart from the body that was presumably torn apart because of this catastrophe. In an aside to the reader, Bely asks him to imagine that his body is expanding until it reaches the size of Saturn, a gargantuan gaseous planet hundreds of times the size of Earth. He again deconstructs the text and characters, but this time does not assemble them again, as if saying that nothing better can come of them. This tail only grows on Nikolai as he is drawn deeper and deeper into Lipanchenko's plot and every addition to it crushes Nikolai under its exponentially increasing weight. Bely then unceremoniously detonates the reader . The sphere expanded, expanded, expanded, and the sphere burst. This modernist technique of fragmentation literally deconstructs the bodies of the stranger and Apollon Apollonovich both as a foreshadowing to the real explosion later in the book and in order to later reconfigure them into other entities.
Common topics in this essay:
Apollon Apollonovich,
Nikolai Apollonovich,
Apollon Apollonovich's,
Andrei Bely,
Anna Petrovna,
Eisenstein's October,
Bely Nikolai,
Apollonovich Nikolai,
Bely Judgment,
Judgment Nikolai,
apollon apollonovich,
nikolai apollonovich,
circular imagery,
crimson sphere,
father son,
cerebral play,
bomb intended,
explosion book,
heavy masses,
expanded expanded,
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Acceptance Essays
