While Andrej Belyj's visit to Africa has attracted little scholarly interest, the writer himself describes the experience as pivotal. His notes on his visit to Tunisia and Egypt were first published as articles and later revised to form two volumes, Putevye zametki (1922) and Afrikanskij dnevnik (which came out only in 1991). Belyj returned to these works several times over a ten-year period and grieved at their indifferent reception, which has continued to the present day. The texts do merit attention, not only due to their intrinsic creativity, but also because they can be viewed in part as an attempt to work through some major themes and supporting imagery of Peterburg, drafted and redrafted within the same time frame. My paper focuses on one such affinity between the travelogues and the novel: Belyj's use of African races, like the more familiar use of Asian ones, to develop the theme of apocalypse. In his travelogues, Arabs, blacks, and fellahin (Egypt's predominant group) are alternately romanticized and demonized. While this fluctuation can be attributed in part to the ambivalence that characterizes Orientalist and Africanist discourse in general, I argue that Belyj's ambiguous portrayal of these peoples has distinctly eschatological undertones.

This reading is prompted, first, by reference to imagery. African races in Belyj's travelogues are connected with motifs often found in apocalyptic texts of the Symbolist period. In ominously intoned passages of Belyj's travel notes, images of dust, ash, and smoke suggest that the fire of civilization has burnt out. Wind and shadow are similarly invoked, hinting at the involvement of forces beyond. Through the prevalence of such imagery in his portrayal of Africa, it appears that the role usually ascribed by Belyj to the East is here imputed to the South. Given the similar functions assigned to races of the East and the South in the travelogues, it is not surprising to find a conflation of African and Asiatic motifs in the various editions of Peterburg—as, for example, in the mixed decor of Nikolaj Apollonovi&chachek;'s room, or in &Shachek;i&shachek;narfne's late-night visit to Dudkin.

To further support my belief that the African races depicted in Belyj's travelogues signify for him an imminent End, I turn to his interest in the rise and fall of ancient African civilizations. While the author celebrates the accomplishments the continent's distant past, in contemporary Africa he finds everywhere signs of atavism. This decay is seen to anticipate the downward trajectory of the West: as the civilizations of Africa reached their ends, he implies, so too will our own. The same parallel appears again in the epilogue of Peterburg, where the protagonist is himself likened to a pyramid, ver&shachek;ina kul&soft;tury, kotoraja—ruxnet.

The fluid transference of symbolic function across ethnic categories, African and Asian, suggests that the use of race in Belyj's eschatology might have as much to do with the sheer otherness of the races in question as with the specific historical relationship between Russia and the East (the Mongol legacy, the war with Japan). This observation might have implications for the application of cultural theory to these texts. The present paper builds primarily on existing Belyj scholarship, such as L. K. Dolgopolov's commentaries on Peterburg, David Bethea's discussion of apocalyptic motifs in that novel, N. V. Kotrelev's comments on Belyj's travel writing, John Elsworth's investigation into the impact of Rudolf Steiner's theory of cultural development on the author, and Olga Muller Cooke's remarks on African imagery in Belyj's Moskva novels. Through close readings, then, I discuss some lesser-known works of a major Silver Age writer in an argument that speaks to various fields of interest, including apocalyptic discourse, the travel genre, Orientalist and Africanist writing, and textual criticism.