On the ‘On the Instruction of Duauf’: Mummification as Text in Andrei Belyj’s 'Petersburg'

• In Event: Writing and Reimagining the Silver Age

Abstract

At the end of Petersburg, Nikolai Apollonovich appears alone in Egypt. There, he completes a manuscript entitled “On the Instruction of Duaufsekhruta,” a monograph on an Egyptian document from the 18th century BCE—an exhortation from father to son to take up the craft of writing. The text is an analogue to Petersburg itself, conceived during Belyj’s own voyage to Egypt in 1911 (which many of the Silver Age authors viewed as the mystical home of Sofiya), where he meditates on preserved but decaying objects. His isolation from the topos of the text semantically structures a caesura across which the text is able to refer to itself and raise questions of its posterity. Like the mummies he sees there, the written text, separated from the market and readership, is preserved from the distortions of critique and rewriting.
I shall relate this displacement to a more fundamental aesthetic preoccupation in Petersburg: on the one hand, writing involves the exhumation and mutilation of literary tradition, while on the other, the text produced aspires to be immortal, cryogenic, safe from dissolution and decay. Among Silver Age writers, Egypt (or indeed, the cities in Western Europe for émigrés) provided a locale from which to view Russia from an aesthetic distance. I also compare these aesthetic questions with Belyj’s later biographical recollections of his time in Egypt from Between Two Revolutions. These boundaries, blurred or crossed in Petersburg, confer the caesura which the written word seeks to undo, but also makes the written word possible.

Author

• Iain Viraj Cunningham, Indiana U Bloomington