부산대학교 도서관

Andrey Belyi’s modernist masterpiece Petersburg is a novel of boundaries— 5between the self and the other, the body and the spirit, and fiction and reality. This paper explores how Belyi employs his anthoposophical beliefs, which play a large role in shaping the symbolism in the novel, to show a world in the process of transfiguration, each character traveling along a spectrum of physicality and ethereality. True to a philosophy of both/and rather than either/or, Belyi uses a variety of states of tangibility of flesh, material, and word to dissolve a system of polarities while paradoxically seeming to reinforce it. Forensic investigation into the origins of symbolism alone cannot elucidate the vortex of meaning that whirls both within and without the pages of Petersburg—one must also navigate the labyrinth of solid, semi-solid, and vaporous symbols in the novel to uncover how exactly to transcend the political, linguistic, and philosophical turmoil detailed on the page. Ultimately, using the materialization of language, Belyi advocates a transcendence of the word itself—a notion that is expressed by the very nature of the novel, which becomes a tool to aid the tangible reader as they navigate the seven spheres of theosophical existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]