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,
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