Images of the novel Peterburg through the prism of Andrei Bely’s esoteric search

Andrei Bely’s texts blur the boundaries of traditional genres, which raises the problem of genre uncertainty and tex integrity. For that purpose, the article analyses the figurative language of the novel Petersburg, the most significant work that accumulates the stylistic and ideological features of Bely’s entire oeuvre. Using the methods of semantic and figurative analysis, the authors address Bely’s Petersburg to identify the factors of textual integrity. As the analysis has shown, the coherence is achieved through esoteric, namely, Masonic symbolism, which dominates the figurative langauge of the novel. Various esoteric symbols are found on all language levels: from phonetic to the level of text. There are characters in the novel that epitomize individual symbols and realia. The authors emphasize the constitutive role of the duplicated esoteric images and symbols that create multiple inline rhymes. In conclusion, the authors note that, together with traditional (characters and realia), the novel contains esoteric images, various direct and indirect esoteric terms and symbols, which Bely either records in the original form or superimposes on or combines with the former ones in the narrative. The genre blurring of Bely’s texts is compensated by the language coherence aligned with the esoteric tradition. When creating literary texts, Bely does not confine himself to the artistic way of knowing and describing the world, but equally uses scientific, religious, and everyday methods of cognition. He creates a synthetic writing, previously found in the esoteric tradition, where it did not go beyond its cognitive tasks. Bely uses synthetic writing with broader functions. This type of writing may be considered as reflecting Bely’s constant polemic with his father, who was an adherent of a strictly scientific method of world cognition. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.