We interpret Bely's fantastical description of the streets in Petersburg in terms of spherical and projective geometry. Poetic shadows of Cantor's work on set theory, countability, and infinity appear in the novel and take on a Symbolist meaning in the context of the Moscow Mathematical School's religiously inspired and mystically driven work on set theory and measure theory. Bely's father is caricatured for his pedantry, absent-mindedness, and penchant for abstraction, yet the structure of the novel itself reflects the father's universal faith in discontinuity. In doing so, we find an amazingly rich array of mathematical manifestations and allusions. This singular aspect of the novel has not escaped the attention of historian nor literary scholar, but nonetheless a “close reading” from a mathematician's eye seems not to have been undertaken previously. It is difficult, if not impossible, to name an important work of literature as heavily imbued with mathematics as Bely's Petersburg. Noah Giansiracusa and Anastasia Vasilyeva In an article posted on, Noah Giansiracusa and Anastasia Vasilyeva argue that this novel has more hidden mathematical references than was previously recognized: In addition to mathematical terminology that appears in metaphors throughout the book, the fact that the father is portrayed with stereotypes usually employed for mathematicians takes on new meaning when one realizes that the author's father was the mathematician Nikolai Bugaev.

In this modernist Russian novel, the revolutionary Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is charged with the task of killing a Tsarist official. A list compiled by Alex Kasman ( College of Charleston)

St petersburg andrei bely