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Chapter Five Grid There is no society without law, no civilization without a city. —Diogenes “ONLY ONCE HAD Apollon Apollonovich taken note of the trivia of life,” reports the narrator of Petersburg, “he had made an audit of the household inventory.” The inventory was registered in proper order and a nomenclature for all the shelves, large and small, was established: there appeared shelves labeled with the Latin letters A, B, C. And the four corners of each shelf received the designation of the four corners of the earth. Putting away his spectacles, Apollon Apollonovich would note in the register , in a fine, minute hand: spectacles, shelf B and NE, that is, northeast. As for the valet, he was given a copy of the register. (6) For everything a place, and each thing in its place. The “four corners of the earth” are very important to Apollon Apollonovich , as they are to Petersburg generally, and as they were to Bely himself . He originally intended to write a trilogy of novels, entitled East or West, with the novel that became Petersburg as the second, “western” installment (The Silver Dove was the first, and was supposed to treat the “eastern” theme). The cardinal points of the compass have acquired a wealth of symbolic significance , and Bely was constantly aware of the symbolism. As for Apollon Apollonovich , he might be attracted to their structural significance: they enable the construction of a grid and therefore the ordering of space. Apollon Apollonovich, paragon of order, favors this simple pattern: in- finitely expandable, measurable, straightforward. The filing of his personal effects obeys a more general protocol of thought, one that relies on straight lines and right angles. For Bely (among many others), the grid stands for rational71 ism, measurement, standardization, and the general trend of Western thought for the last several hundred years. It is a way of seeing and doing. THE PRAGMATIC PRINCIPLE OF ICE The grid appears as a kind of constraint—a certain enforced regularity to which one must accommodate one’s claims and activities.1 It is not hard to see why Bely found such a thing attractive. He seems to have grasped, intuitively, the need for constraints on his abundant genius. His essays are full of graphs, diagrams, charts, and other visual assurances of plausibility. His logical scaffolding is not concealed in the subject matter of his arguments but is typically placed on full display with repeated “thus’s,” “therefore’s,” “if-then’s,” and “however’s.” Insofar as expository writing depends on logic, the formal representation of elements and proposition within a rational-looking grid is probably no surprise. But artistic genius also requires constraints, as Bely quickly came to realize. As a poet, he bent his efforts to the realization of various types of meter, which he considered an essential element of poetry. Like grammar itself , meter is a system of rules that does not have to stifle but can actually enable the creative realization of verbal art. Apollon Apollonovich fantasizes about grids. Riding to work in the morning, he imagines imposing order on the “coarse, industrial” (and, at the time, politically subversive) population of the islands that make up part of the city of St. Petersburg: “The islands must be crushed! Riveted with the iron of the enormous bridge, skewered by the arrows of the prospects” (11). His ultimate (imaginary) goal is as harmonious as a piece of graph paper, with “one square per ‘solid citizen’” (11). Apollon Apollonovich is not an artist but a government official, and his ideal social grid appears stultifying, oppressive, and monotonous. It is bleak and cold. “But having things cold was elevated into a principle by Senator Ableukhov” (8). Well, a couple of degrees colder and Petersburg’s ubiquitous, disgusting “icy drizzle” would disappear. That would be nice, but is it a principle ? What is the principle? In 1880, the year of Boris Bugaev’s birth, Konstantin Leontiev wrote an editorial advocating the “freezing” of Russia, the cessation of reforms and a reduction in the liberty and equality accorded to Russian subjects. This notion of “freezing Russia” has been identified2 as a possible source for the senator’s love of cold. The connection with Leontiev is especially appealing given the odd affection that these two reactionary Russians, Ableukhov and Leontiev, share for that prototypical liberal Englishman, John Stuart Mill. In Leontiev’s reading, Mill’s On Liberty is not actually about liberty but The Stony Dance 72 [3.142...

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