Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921

Concluding Remarks

327 Concluding Remarks   If the reader has not yet perused the Web site titled Mapping Petersburg, we invite the reader to do so. The Web site is quite literally a virtual part 3 of “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City 1900–1921, even though the two exist as wholes unto themselves.1 What we understood from the inception of this project is that modernism, its narrative and representational practices, contained the seeds of hypertextuality. Just as the collapse of binaries had already been observed in modernist aesthetics, the contemporary Web experience may be compared to the sensory psychic shock associated with the modern city, which Bely aligns with the “swarming” Russian metropolis of 1905. We call this experience surfing the Web, as we become part of the anonymous World Wide Web after learning how to navigate its initially shocking alienating space, an experience that may be compared to the way residents and visitors learn how to navigate metropolitan cities. The explosion of digital map-based media and related mapping narratives, of which our Web site is an example, helps mediate physical and virtual space and thereby makes the physical familiar. The desire to suture physical urban space and the way it was experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century was already the focus of the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who wrote about the contingent relationship of proximity and distance not only in spatial but also affective terms. The coeval literary and visual arts did something similar. They represented the fusion of physical and psychic space by using fragmented and spatialized narrative and imagery. Such an approach to the novel typifies Bely’s Petersburg. If hypertext is defined by a nonlinear network of links, a new form of interconnectedness premised on a disjunctive structure, then Bely’s novel, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, to which Petersburg has been compared, qualifies as one of the starting points of hypertext. The claim that “if Joyce were writing today, he would have chosen hypertext” is a commonplace of contemporary criticism: “And not only was “Ulysses” before its time in literary terms,” writes Karlin Lillington; “it is also, extravagantly, the über-hypertext.”2 A hypertext version of Joyce’s novel resides on the Web, as do the Sirin edition of Petersburg in Russian and the Maguire and Malmstad English translation (Limited View on Google Books).3 Working with Bely’s novel online is a very different experience from reading it in book form, opening it up to innumerable research possibilities determined by the individual user. We can compare our approach to Petersburg to the multiple ways of viewing the city through the hypertext practice of overlaying city maps on specific experiences of city life. Such suture structures Mapping Petersburg, featuring a 1907 historical map with ten interactive itineraries through the Russian capital that explore its burgeoning modernity and literary modernism. Mimicking Bely’s narrator, we can rightfully claim that our city essays emerge from the digital dots on the Web site map, that from it emerges part 2 of the printed book “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City. We can also claim that just as the two Petersburgs, fictional and physical, exist in relation to each other in the volume , so too do its essays relate to the hypertextual Web site. In any case, the inscription of early twentieth-century Petersburg in the space of the Web offers the reader the next best thing to an intimate encounter with the late imperial Russian capital. The spatial focus of the essays, beside an urban concern, reflects their origin in hypertext narrative: hypertext, a spatial medium, can be entered from different locations, like a city, which in the words of Gilles Deleuze “is defined by entries and exits.”4 Unlike most verbal narratives that develop in time, requiring the reader to enter at the beginning, hypertext narrative has multiple entry points that are determined by the user. In this regard and in regard to modernism, its structure can be said to resemble avant-garde collage, which consists of multiple objects and texts revealing the relational aspect of juxtaposition , the staple of cyberspace. The spatiality of hypertext and its multiple entry points produce a multiplicity of perspectives and immediacy of experience , which in Mapping Petersburg offers the virtual experience of navigating a historical city and putting its sites in contact with each other. This a printed text cannot do, nor can it offer the kind of rapid participatory attractions and montage of...