1. Harpham, Geoffrey Gait, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Aurora, Colo., 2006), 220 Google Scholar.

2. Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Jephcott, Edmund (New York, 2000), 51 Google Scholar.

3. For a theoretical discussion of the ethics and aesthetics of disgust, I refer you to the following excellent books: Miller, William Ian, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)Google Scholar; Menninghaus, Winfried, Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt am Main, 1999)Google Scholar, translated into English as Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany, 2003); Wilson, Robert Rawdon, The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust (Edmonton, 2002)Google Scholar; Nussbaum, Martha C., Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar; Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass., 2005)Google Scholar.

4. Menninghaus, , Disgust, 1 Google Scholar.

5. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1982), 3–4 Google Scholar.

6. See, e.g., Rozin, Paul, Haidt, Jonathan, and McCauley, Clark R., “Disgust,” in Lewis, Michael and Haviland-Jones, Jeannette M., eds., Handbook of Emotions, 2d ed. (New York, 2000), 638-41Google Scholar; Bataille, Georges, “Mouth,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (Minneapolis, 1985), 59–60 Google Scholar.

7. Bakhtin, Mikhail M., Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Helene (Bloomington, 1984), 407 Google Scholar.

8. Describing his creative process in Arabeski in 1908, Belyi compared it to the action of the bomb-throwing anarchist: “My writing is a bomb that I throw. The life inside me is a bomb that has been thrown at me. One bomb strikes another—sprays of shards, two intersecting rows of sequences. Shards of my writing represent the forms of art; shards of the visible are the images of necessity that blow up my life.” Belyi, Andrei, “Iskusstvo,” Arabeski, in Kritika. Estetika. Teoriia simvolizma, ed. Kazin, A. L. (Moscow, 1994), 2:200 Google Scholar. In his memoirs, Belyi compares himself to Ivan Kaliaev, the bomb-throwing assassin of Grand Duke Sergei. See Belyi, Andrei, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. Lavrov, A. V (Moscow, 1990), 79 Google Scholar.

9. Chronos/Saturn defines the relationship between father and son. Much has been written about the mythological and theosophic meaning of die god in Petersburg, whom I consider in relation to the oral sphere. Apollon Apollonovich, the Chronos/Saturn figure in the novel, is also associated with die devouring tarantula by bodi Nikolai and Dudkin and with the Gorgon Medusa: “die unseen little white light diat flared up between the eyes and forehead scattered sheafs of snake-like lightning; the lightning-thoughts dispersed like snakes from his bald head, and if a clairvoyant stood before the distinguished gendeman at that moment, he would undoubtedly see die head of die Gorgon Medusa. And he would be seized with Medusa-like terror by Apollon Apollonovich.” Belyi, Andrei, Peterburg (Moscow, 1981), 50 Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., 329-30.

11. Ibid., 332. Cf. Franz Kafka's expression of disgust at his own conception. In a letter he writes that the sight of the bed where he was conceived “can turn his stomach inside out,” as if he was “indissolubly connected with these repulsive things; something still clings to the feet as they try to break free, held fast as they are in the primordial slime.” Quoted in Menninghaus, , Disgust, 243–44Google Scholar.

12. “Where death is, there is also birth, change, renewal. The image of birth is no less ambivalent; it represents the body that is born and at the same time shows the image of die departing one.” Bakhtin, , Rabelais, 409 Google Scholar.

13. Wilson, , Hydra's Tale, 66 Google Scholar.

14. Lippanchenko is also associated with the sucking gesture: he sucks in air like an infant as if it were milk from a botde, and by extension he sucks in others in the novel.

15. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Barnes, Hazel Estella (New York, 1956), 772–78Google Scholar.

16. Belyi, , Peterburg, 40 Google Scholar.

17. Cf. Belyi's representation of Maiakovskii's expressive hyperbolic poetry: “The poem War and Peace is a hyperbole that gapes its snout at Gogol's hyperbole, having swallowed it to grow fat from its juices and then release them into the juicy plumbing of the arteries: ‘rusty viscous liquid was oozing in die plumbing'; ‘continents hang like carcasses on bayonets.'” Belyi, Andrei, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow, 1934), 312 Google Scholar.

18. Earlier we are told that Lippanchenko wanted to export Russian pigs abroad for the purpose of getting rich. In an earlier patricidal fantasy, which is accompanied by feelings of nausea, the narrator and Nikolai imagine plunging a knife into his father: “This is how a suckling pig in aspic and horseradish sauce is carved,” which is the first instance of this astonishing culinary figuration of death in the novel. Belyi, , Peterburg, 221 Google Scholar.

19. Elias, , Civilizing Process, 120 Google Scholar.

20. Belyi, , Peterburg, 386 Google Scholar. Earlier in the novel, the narrator offers a cannibalistic image of his own: he compares Lippanchenko to a bloody skinned carcass with a gaping snout hanging in a butcher shop. Ibid., 282. As in Dudkin's fantasy of carving Lippanchenko's cooked body, die imdge of slaughter (resulting in a skinned carcass) is insinuated into the narrator's fantasy; the narrator, like Dudkin, also subverts Lippanchenko's edibility: the surreal carcass appropriates the power of the gaze and confronts us with its bloody meat that has assumed the shape of a gaping snout. (Note that elsewhere in the novel, there is a reference to the city's slaughterhouse and its butchers.)

21. The sculptor Falconet, whose work was influenced by the Baroque sensibility, created an equestrian statue whose rider is represented in neoclassicist terms, but as Alexander Schenker writes, the representation of the horse rearing on its hind hoofs reflects “baroque resdessness,” as does the “fluid wave-like shape of the pedestal.” Schenker, Alexander M., The Bronze Horseman: Falconet's Monument to Peter the Great (New Haven, 2003), 265 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. For a discussion of the natural cycle and the transcendence of its inexorable inscription of death in Vladimir Solov'ev's erotic Utopia, see Matich, Olga, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siecle (Madison, 2005), 59–61, 74-77Google Scholar.

23. Belyi quoted in Ljunggren, Magnus, The Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj's Novel “Peterburg” (Stockholm, 1982), 27 Google Scholar.

24. Belyi, , Peterburg, 39 Google Scholar.

25. For further discussion of “suddenly” and “cerebral play,” see Matich, Olga, “Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance in Andrej Belyj's Petersburg,” Russian Literature (Special Issue: Andrej Belyj— On the Occasion of His 125th Birthday), 58, nos. 1-2 (2005): 149-65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Note also that the words vdrugand sdvigshare three consonant sounds: v, d, and g.

27. To my knowledge, the first scholar to consider the homosexual subtext of the Dudkin-Lippanchenko relationship is Ljunggren in The Dream of Rebirth. In contrast to Belyi's treatment, there are also positive coeval representations of same-sex love in Russian literature at the beginning of the twendefh century, e.g., in Kuzmin's, Mikhail Kryl'ia (Wings, 1906)Google Scholar. Belyi initially wrote a negative review of the novel (“'Kryl'ia’ Kuzmina,“ Pereval, 1907, no. 6: 50-51), although he later changed his opinion of it.

28. See “Commentary” by S. S. Grechishkin, L. K. Dolgopolov, and A. V Lavrov, in Belyi, Peterburg, 676w41.

29. For example, it is suggested that Lippanchenko is a Jew; the representation of Sofia Petrovna can certainly be described as misogynist.

30. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity. Instead of furthering the civilizing process, disgust, according to Nussbaum, frequently does the opposite: it undermines the values of what she calls liberal society. Although much less concerned with its illiberal function, Miller attributes a similar exclusionary function to disgust. Miller, , Anatomy of Disgust, 194–205 Google Scholar. Aurel Kolnai, the first modern thinker to consider the emotion in philosophical and theoretical terms, wrote as early as 1929 that, in certain instances, disgust “stands, one might say, in irregular service of the morally good.” Kolnai, Aurel, Korsmeyer, Carolyn, and Smith, Barry, On Disgust (Chicago, 2004), 81 Google Scholar.

31. Here is Apollon Apollonovich's memory of the first night with his young wife: “an expression of disgust, disdain, masked by a submissive smile. That night Apollon Apollonovich, already a state councilor, committed the vile act sanctioned by set form: he raped the young woman. The rape went on for years, and one of those nights, Nikolai Apollonovich was conceived—between two different kinds of smiles, lechery and submission. Was it surprising then that Nikolai Apollonovich was as a result a composite of disgust, fear, and lechery?” Belyi, , Peterburg, 362 Google Scholar.

32. Belyi, , Peterburg, 256 Google Scholar.

33. Miller, , Anatomy of Disgust, 40–41 Google Scholar.

34. Petersburg makes reference to the pollution of the Neva by germs.

35. “Nikolai Apollonovich stood in the billowing white clouds of stench from the kitchen, pale, white, and crazed, his red moudi agape, but not laughing, with a halo of very light, fog-like linen hair—a hunted animal, he bared his teeth and turned to Morkovin.“ Belyi, , Petertmrg, 212 Google Scholar. The gaping mouth, which is here framed by stench—of food and, by association, of a decaying corpse—morphs into an image of bared teeth, revealing Nikolai's animal nature. Before the kiss, Morkovin brings his “open oral cavity up to Nikolai Apollonovich like a cannibal who was going to swallow Ableukhov.” Ibid., 203-4. What we see are two disgusting oral cavities facing each other in a scene permeated by disgusting animal imagery.

36. Belyi, , Peterburg, 277 Google Scholar.

37. Ibid., 298-99.

38. We get our first inkling of Dudkin's homosexual desire during his first meeting with Nikolai, when he tells Nikolai that he has never been in love with women, and that since Helsingfors he has lusted after fetish objects: women's body parts and parts of clothing like stockings. He also tells Nikolai that men have been in love with him, which Ableukhov interprets to mean Lippanchenko. In other words, Dudkin represents himself as a fetishist, which at the turn of the twentieth century was associated with same-sex desire. In his conversation with Shishnarfne, he speaks about ritual fetishism, especially in satanist cults, suggesting once again the suppressed reference to “kissing the Goat's arse and stamping on the cross.“

39. Miller, , Anatomy of Disgust, 98–100 Google Scholar.

40. Similar feelings are evoked by Dudkin's grotesque morphing body in the subsequent scene in which the Bronze Horseman pours his molten metals into Dudkin's veins. Like other characters in the novel, the Bronze Horseman is a metamorphic figure, changing shapes and assuming different forms.

41. Ljunggren, , Dream of Rebirth, 14 Google Scholar. Here is how Munch described his painting: “You know my picture, The Scream'? I was being stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood—I was at a breaking point.” Quoted in Prideaux, Sue, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (New Haven, 2005), 152 Google Scholar.

42. It is a commonplace of Petersburg criticism that the image of Sofia Petrovna Likhutina and Nikolai's romantic involvement with her is Belyi's parodic representation of his obsessive love for Liubov’ Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, Aleksandr Blok's wife, and of their tumultuous relationship in the summer of 1905.

43. Rumble, Vanessa, “Scandinavian Conscience: Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Munch,“ in Howe, Jeffrey W., ed., Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression (Chicago, 2001), 27 Google Scholar. In The Philosophy of Art, Arthur Schopenhauer claimed that art was not able to reproduce a scream expressively; Belyi proved him wrong, as did Munch the symbolist, deploying what can be described as symbolist synesthesia, with light and color rendering sound and rhythm, and vice versa.

44. N. A. Kaidalova has perceptively noted that Nikolai's head resembles Konstantin Somov's well-known portrait of Blok (1907). Kaidalova, N. A., “Risunki Andreia Belogo,“ in Lesnevskii, Stanislav and Mikhailov, Aleksandr Alekseevich, eds., Andrei Belyi: Problemy tvorchestva (Moscow, 1988), 599 Google Scholar.

45. In 1906, Belyi frequented the café Simplicissimus in Munich—gathering place of the Secession artists with whom Munch was affiliated.

46. Belyi, , “Prorok bezlichiia,” Arabeski, 2:10-21 passimGoogle Scholar.

47. Quoted in Stang, Ranga Thiis, Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art, trans. Culverwell, Geoffrey (New York, 1979), 90 Google Scholar. Homo sapiens was enormously popular in Russia.

48. Belyi, , Peterburg, 265 Google Scholar.

49. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoün: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, ed. McCormick, Edward Allen (Baltimore, 1984), 7–8 Google Scholar.

50. Belyi, , “O Vladimire Solov'eve,” Arabeski, 350 Google Scholar. In the same essay, Belyi also emphasizes Solov'ev's raucous demonic laughter emanating from the torn mouth.

51. “His red mouth tore open [ … ] his teeth, that were biting, shone in the oral cavity that appeared for a moment to be a snout; his head began to write commas; finally, freeing himself from the armchair, he squeezed his fingers hysterically below his torn mouth and pressed his curly head to his trembling fingers in order to hide his tongue.“ Belyi, , Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 416.1 Google Scholar remember my grandfather, who had known Berdiaev, performing the philosopher's nervous tic at the dinner table. The rest of us would invariably watch with fascination, especially my brother and I, and then proceed to express our disgust with my grandfather's bad table manners. At table? Really! How disgusting!

52. Bakhtin, , Rabelais, 317 Google Scholar.

53. Ibid., 321.

54. Nussbaum, Martha C., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), 625 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55. Ibid., 204.