"Petersburg" by Andrei Bely is one of the most remarkable and complex novels of the twentieth century. White creates a different world with its own laws - verbal, compositional and even physical. The authors of the study are trying to establish what techniques he uses - and what effects he achieves. They characterize Bely's writing technique as artistic tongue-tied language, by which they mean imitation of inability to express correctly. In compositional technologies, specific combinations of connection and incoherence are distinguished, among which false incoherence plays a special role - imitation of confusion, behind which an invisible connection is hidden. In the final chapter, the authors propose a reconstruction of the novel's four through lines - bombs, promises, letters and time - each of which vividly shows that behind the chaos on the surface of the work lies a carefully arranged order. The author of "Petersburg" asks the reader riddles that seem insoluble, and at the same time hides hints in the text that allow them to be solved. In this, "Petersburg" is like a detective - with the difference that it is not a crime that needs to be solved, but the meaning of the statement. The authors of the study compare Bely's stylistic and compositional techniques with those of Gogol and Andrei Platonov. Approaches to the theoretical understanding of foreign language and foreign relations in the works of various prose writers are discussed.