Date on Senior Honors Thesis

5-2025

Document Type

Senior Honors Thesis

Degree Name

B.A.

Department

Humanities

Committee Chair

Simona Bertacco

Committee Member

Elise Franklin

Committee Member

Julie Bunck

Author's Keywords

Russian literature; Russia; Orientalism; Postcolonialism; Symbolism

Abstract

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.

Lay Summary

Russian literature has not typically received the same degree of postcolonial critique as some other national literatures, but the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine redirected scholarly attention toward Russia’s cultural narratives about its imperial peripheries. My thesis hopes to contribute to this movement to combine Russian literature and postcolonial theory by analyzing Andrei Bely’s 1913 novel Petersburg through Edward Said’s critical frameworks developed in his booksOrientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1994). While Petersburg came from an artistic movement, Symbolism, that wanted to erase the boundaries between artforms, reading it with attention to its attitudes around race and empire reveals how firmly Bely held these differences between people to be true. Petersburg aims to eliminate divisions but maintains an essential opposition between “East” and “West”; thus, I argue, attitudes of orientalism and imperialism are not irrelevant to the novel but a deeply entrenched part of it.

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