Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Andrei Bely
The Major Symbolist Fiction
Vladimir E. Alexandrov
To my parents,
to Sybil
Acknowledgments
Contents
Introduction
1 The Symphonies
2 The Silver Dove
1
5
68
3 Petersburg
100
153
Conclusion
191
Notes
195
Index
219
Andrei Bely
Note on Transliteration
A knowledge of Russian is not necessary to read the pages that follow. Familiar or readily accessible renderings of Russian names have
been used in the body of the text; these are based on a simplified version of the Library of Congress system for transliterating Cyrillic: "System II" in J. Thomas Shaw's pamphlet The Transliteration of Modern
Russian for English-Language Publications (Madison, Wisconsin: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). However, the transliteration of
Russian words in the text and all transliterations in the notes follow this
system consistently in order to facilitate reconstruction of the original.
The only exceptions are the different transliteration systems used in
critical works I cite, which I have preserved unchanged.
Introduction
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880-1934), better known by his pseudonym, Andrei Bely, was a protean figure in Russian literature during
the first decades of this century. A great novelist, leading poet, critic,
memoirist, theoretician of Symbolism and precursor of the Formalists,
he left a published legacy of some fifty volumes and hundreds of
shorter works. Bely's role in Russian letters has been described as that
of "an incandescent, almost blinding presence"; contemporaries spoke
repeatedly of his decisive influence on the next generation of writers;
and in the context of European Modernism he has been ranked with
Joyce, Kafka, and Proust. 1
Four years before his death, Bely surveyed his large corpus of belleslettres and concluded that there were only a half dozen works "in which
I appear as a verbal artist and not a publicist." His short list included
the experimental prose narrative The Second Symphony (1902), and
the novels The Silver Dove (1909), Petersburg (1913-14; 1922), Kotik
Letaev (1917-18), The Baptized Chinaman (1921), and Moscow
(1926).2
This is unusually harsh self-criticism. Inevitably, it is also open to debate. Many students of Russian literature would object to his omission
of all works of poetry, especially The First Encounter (1921), which is
widely recognized as one of the great narrative poems of the century. 3
On the other hand, many would object to his inclusion of Moscow, a
novel that has yet to find an enthusiastic audience and must be considered a distinct failure, both by comparison to the earlier novels and according to intrinsic criteria. Perhaps Bely mentioned it in a flush of enthusiasm over its sequel, Masks, which he was writing at the time, but
which was to prove, upon publication in 1932, an even greater disap-
Andrei Bely
pointment to his readers than Moscow. Some might also object, if less
strenuously, to the inclusion of The Baptized Chinamana generally
pale work whose interest lies largely in the fact that it is a sequel to the
often dazzling Kotik Letaev.
With some alterations, then, Bely's own list is close to being an accurate assessment of his most durable contribution to Russian, and, indeed, European literary art. 4 His contribution to literature in the
broader senseincluding memoirs, criticism and theoretical worksis
qualitatively comparable and quantitatively much greater.
My focus is on Bely's narrative prose fiction from what could be designated his early and middle periods, 1902-1921. In addition to the Second Symphony, I have included the First, Third, and Fourth. Although
these sui generis prose narratives differ greatly in quality, they are of
major interest as prfigurations of Bely's three great novels: The Silver
Dove, Petersburg, and Kotik Letaev. The Baptized Chinaman, because
of its close connection to Kotik Letaev, cannot be ignored entirely. On
the other hand, his late novels Moscow and Masks will be omitted, not
so much for their weakness, as because they bear little relation to his
earlier works from the particular point of view that I have chosen for
this study.5
Bely is probably the most difficult novelist that Russian literature has
produced. It is frequently hard to determine what his texts are about
and how to approach them. The reason for this, I would argue, is that
Bely did not find the conventions of established genres adequate for the
expression of his unique apprehension of the human condition. Thus
he was compelled to find new devices and different principles of organization for his narratives in order to present his hermetic world view.
At the heart of Bely's view of man was, first and foremost, the connection between man and a transcendent, spiritual, or divine realm.
This vertical axisthe trunk of Bely's art and lifeevolves from the
Symphonies through the major novels, but always remains in the foreground of his works. Starting with The Baptized Chinaman, however,
the spiritual concern begins to recede; and in Moscoio and Masks it has
largely disappeared into the background.
Because it is clear from a number of Bely's autobiographical works
(which were never published in the Soviet Union) that he remained a
confirmed occultist to the end of his life, it is my assumption that the
late, major reorientation in his art was due more to external political
pressures than to any change of heart. Bely implied as much when he
wrote that upon his return to Russia from Berlin in 1923, where he had
spent two years, he found himself in "the 'grave' into which Trotsky
had placed me, [and] after Trotsky all his followers, [then] all the crit-
Introduction
Andrei Bely
expectation dominated Bely's thinking and artistic practice from the beginning to the end of his creative life. In fact, the link between man and
the transcendent is the one element common to all of Bely s works in
different genres: lyric and narrative poetry, "Symphonies," and novels.
It is also the one constant (albeit sometimes concealed) feature of everything else that he wrote, including theoretical and critical essays,
letters, and memoirs.
Despite the significant evolution of his conception of symbolism, the
component elements in the act of symbolic perception always remained
the same for Belythe individual, the material world, and the otherworldly realm; what changed in his theory and art over the years was
the relationship among the three. To identify the nature of this relationship in individual works, and to trace how it evolved from his early experiments in the Symphonies to the more complex major novels will be
my primary concern in the pages that follow. I will also suggest how
Bely's conception of symbolism is manifested in the stylistic and formal
features of the works in question.
Bely s art could and should be approached from other points of view
as well. There is much in his works that has yet to receive any significant scholarly attention. But five decades after his death, at a time
when he is far from being officially accepted in the Soviet Union, I believe it is essential to concentrate on what is fundamental in him. A
study of the beliefs that motivated Bely s works is a necessary prolegomenon to a full and accurate understanding of his legacy.
The Symphonies
1
De la musique avant toute chose
Paul Verlaine
Bely's four Symphonies are unique fictional prose forms. In comparison to traditional nineteenth-century narrative genres, their most striking characteristic is fragmentariness: the texts consist of sequences of
short paragraphs that are sometimes linked only metaphorically or by
means of leitmotifs; narrative points of view change often; symbolic
imagery expressing the frequently occult inner experiences of the narrator is intercalated with, and occupies nearly as much space as, the intermittent exposition of setting, plot, and character; and the organizing
beliefs and hierarchies of values in the works are hidden, requiring the
reader to become involved in deciphering the texts more actively than
do most narratives from previous eras. Thematically, all four works
are primarily concerned with symbolic cognition, a dualistic world of
matter and spirit, and the apocalypsewhether universal, personal, or
both.
In order to gain some perspective on the nature of Bely's achievement, it would be useful to characterize briefly some of the Symbolist
narratives composed at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of
the twentieth centuries, and to distinguish them from works that may
"merely" contain symbols.
In Charles Feidelson, Jr. s cogently argued view, the modern (that is,
nineteenth and twentieth-century) literary Symbolist
redefines the whole process of knowing and the status of reality in
the light of poetic method. He tries to take both poles of perception into account at once, to view the subjective and objective
worlds as functions of each other by regarding both as functions
of the forms of speech in which they are rendered.
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
not be said to embody any of the cognitive presuppositions of Symbolism, such as those to which Baudelaire gave most famous expression in
the first quatrain of "Correspondances": "La Nature est un temple o de
vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; /L'homme
y passe travers des forts de symboles / Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers." Furthermore, the work does not utilize the oblique
communication that typifies Symbolist poetry, nor is it innovative formally. Indeed, A rebours has been aptly described as being "about the
Symbolist experience" rather than an embodiment of it. 4
Karl Uitti has argued that a school of authentically Symbolist novelists first appeared in France during the decade 1 8 8 5 - 1 8 9 5 . 5 Reacting
against the esthetics and underlying world view of the naturalist novel
as codified by Zola, and responding to a renewed vogue for Schopenhauerespecially the idea that the world in which the individual exists
is his own cognitive constructsuch writers as Maurice Barrs,
Edouard Dujardin, Rmy de Gourmont, and Jean Lorrain created narratives in which all the content is the product of one central character's
perceptions. A first-person point of view in which the implied author's,
the protagonist's, and the other characters' perspectives overlap was
typically and inevitably the result. The language of the text produced
thus became the symbolic embodiment of the interaction of this merged
perceiver's inner experiences with images drawn from the world outside him. In Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coups (1887), for example,
probably the best known work of this school, the object of the hero's
love exists only when he is thinking of her. Indeed, the entire novel consists of one continuous "interior monologue" (the term is Dujardin's)
presenting the detailed movements of the protagonist's consciousness
during a six-hour period. (Joyce would later acknowledge the influence
of this work on Ulysses.)
The epistemological premise of such works left a distinctive imprint
on the texture and character of their language. Since the narrative style
was intended to reproduce the idiosyncratic nature of the protagonist's
association of ideas, traditional syntactical rules were often abandoned.
And because the writers in question were consciously struggling
against everything that tried to deny individualism, and viewed themselves as superior to all that was common, their vocabulary tended to
become filled with rare and exotic words.
As far as is known, these relatively obscure French writers probably
had no direct influence on Bely's earliest literary efforts in the late
1890s. Clearly, however, certain of his stylistic features, such as a frequent and easy departure from the norms of nineteenth-century belletristic word order, punctuation, and even typographical arrangement
of text on the page, and his constant gravitation toward the first-person
Andrei Bely
in his narratives, constitute an interesting example of convergent evolution. (The device of recurring leitmotifs in Dujardin's novel and in Bely's Symphonies and later works derives for both writers from Wagner
and the cult of his music in fin-de-sicle Europe.) The most important
common ground Bely shared with these French writers is that he and
they acted in accordance with similar cognitive assumptions about
Symbolism, and attempted to overcome the distinction between subject and object by means of a perceptive act. The greatest differences
between Bely and the Symbolistes are that he did not write the same
sort of extended first-person narratives (although he did write lyric poetry all his life), and that he was a metaphysical Symbolistone who
always involved the otherworldly realm as the third component in
man's cognitive interaction with the world outside him.
All of this is not to say, of course, that Bely was unfamiliar with
either the general ambiance or the specific writers and works of French
Symbolism. Clearly he was acquainted with both, at first through exposure while still an adolescent in the culturally avant-garde household
of Olga and Mikhail Soloviev (the philosopher's brother), and later,
after he had decided to become a writer during his early twenties,
through the mediation of the "first" generation of Russian Symbolists
especially that of the Francophile Valry Briusov. At first, under Olga
Mikhailovna's tutelage, Bely's initial response to French Symbolism
was enthusiastic. But after he had begun to find his own way in literature his attitude became negative; and in later years he expressed scorn
for it on more than one occasion. In 1912, for example, he catalogued
the failings of a number of its major and minor representatives. In his
view, Mallarm and Villiers de l'lsle-Adam had failed to formulate an
adequate theory of Symbolism; Rmy de Gourmont was "rather empty"; and Jean Moras, Ren Ghil, and Henri de Rgnier were "very boring." By contrast, Bely saw his roots, and those of the "second" generation of Russian Symbolists to which he felt he belonged, in the
Symbolism of the "Germanic race"namely that of Wagner, Nietzsche
and Ibsen, 6 as well as in a number of nineteenth-century Russian writers, including Lermontov, Gogol, Tiutchev, Fet, and especially the philosopher, mystic, and poet Vladimir Soloviev.
In Russia there had been little Symbolist fiction before Bely's earliest
experiments with writing prose fragments in 1897-1898, or even before
his Symphonies began to appear in 1902. Julian the Apostate, the first
volume of Dmitry Merezhkovsky's historical trilogy, Christ or Antichrist, appeared in 1894, followed by Leonardo da Vinci (1901) and Peter and Alexis (1905). In the early 1890s Merezhkovsky's poetry and essays had been among the first signs of a revolt in Russian culture against
the reigning positivism of the day, and this was certainly an attitude
The Symphonies
Bely shared from the start. However, the only conceivably Symbolist
feature of Merezhkovsky s novels is the author's constant (and simplistic)
opposition of the spirit and the flesh, and his search for a means of uniting them. There is no stylistic or formal resemblance between Merezhkovsky's novels and anything Bely (or the French Symbolist novelists)
wrote. The one trait they share is the theme of apocalypse, which was
widespread throughout fin-de-sicle Europe as well as Russia. Roger
Keys characterizes Merezhkovsky's works, as well as the early stories
and novels by his wife Zinaida Gippius, as defined by the "inertia of
hackneyed forms inherited from an earlier utilitarian fictional esthetic.' 7
The important Russian Symbolist poet Briusov also wrote prose fiction. His best known work is the The Fiery Angel (1907), a historical
novel about witchcraft and demonic possession in Renaissance Germany. However, its utilization of a sixteenth-century narrative viewpoint effectively distances the author from the seemingly occult experiences described in the text, and the narrator's own doubts about their
being anything more than the workings of a deranged psyche undermine them further. In the absence of authoritative symbolic perceptions, it is hard to see how the work could be considered Symbolistic in
any strict sense of the term. Briusov's other prose works, although colored by distinctly "decadent" preoccupations, also do not grow out of
the epistemological premises of Symbolism.
Indeed, one is forced to conclude that other than Bely's, the only truly
Symbolist prose written in Russia at the beginning of the century was
by Fedor Sologub (1863-1927), whose novel The Petty Demon (1907) is
a classic of the period. The symbolic perceptions of the narratorwho
seems identical to the implied authorand the characters exhibit a tension comparable to what one finds in Bely. But Sologub's languid syntax,
traditional narrative forms, and peculiar blend of morbidity, sensuality, and idealism are all quite different from what one finds in Bely's art.
In short, an examination of Bely's Symphonies and later works in the
context of European and Russian Symbolist prose fiction is more useful
for illuminating theoretical issues related to Symbolist narrative genres
than for tracing the provenance of Bely's own works.
10
Andrei Bely
journey to build a tower and lead his people "to the heights" (p. 21).
The son does not fulfill this vaguely Nietzschean or Ibsenesque task; instead, he retires with his wife to a tower in which he subsequently
grows old and dies. It falls to his daughter, the Princess, to succeed
where he had failed. She has from childhood felt something like a
Gnostic longing for the spiritual beyond: she has a "sad smile concealing memories" (p. 33); and her mother's last words are "I entrust you to
Eternity" (p. 40). Later in the Symphony, the Princess descends from
the tower, "fulfilling a heavenly command. She was setting out to expel
darkness" (p. 88). Raising a crucifix on a staff, the Princess wreaks havoc among the "black knights," "evil chapels," and "demons" of the land.
The Princess' story is intertwined with that of a young Knight whom
she saves. Although mired in evil, he too is touched by a longing for his
spiritual homeland: "[he] thirsted for dreams from beyond the clouds,
but dark ancestral forces arose in his soul" (pp. 52-53). The Princess
prays for the Knight, and as a result the evil entrapping him loses its
hold. After death, both transcend the fallen world and enter the Edenlike supernatural realm of Eternity, where not only St. Peter, but the
Lord God Himself appears. 9
The ideological framework of this tale hinges on an image of a female
figure of salvation combating evil. Given Bely s well-known veneration
of the religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), this concept evokes, at the very least, an echo of Soloviev's apocalyptic Sophiology.
Soloviev taught the existence of an aspect of the Trinity known as
Hagia Sophia, or Divine Wisdom. He conceived of this mystical "absolute unity" of the Trinity as a female being (his own visions of whom he
described in his poem "Three Meetings" ["Tri svidaniia," 1894]). Her
role in the cosmos is both to cause the appearance of all that is not divine, and to effect the reintegration of all in God. This is accomplished
through man, who is the one aspect of the material world having a potential unity in God. Man encounters the opposition between God and
what lies outside Him in the difference between the sexes. Through
union with woman by means of love, therefore, and through striving
for the union of mankind, man participates in Divine Wisdom's reintegration of the world in God. 10
In a late prophetic work, "A Brief Tale about the Antichrist" (1900),
Soloviev identified Divine Wisdom overtly with the Apocalyptic
"woman clothed with the sun," and made her manifestation on earth
into a central event of his personal refraction of the Biblical Revelation
of St. John the Divine. This particular work, and Soloviev's poetical expression of the philosophical idea of Divine Wisdom, or the Eternal
Feminine (itself an attempt to rationalize mystical experience), seized
The Symphonies
11
12
Andrei Bely
Bely's name for the world view and artistic method that yoked man
to the transcendent realm was "symbolism." Before turning to the text
of the First Symphony and Bely's symbolistic method in practice, it
might be instructive to glance at some of his roughly contemporaneous
theoretical pronouncements on the subject. In his first published essay,
"The Forms of Art" (1902), he explains that symbolism is an attempt "to
unite the temporal with the atemporal; to show the unusual meaning in
an everyday action." A special type of perception lies at the heart of
symbolic art: "Knowing how to see is knowing how to understand the
eternal meaning in images, their idea." 15
The merged dual nature of symbolsthe view that they are created
when a "perceiver" underscores the Platonic Idea in an imageis a
point Bely also stresses in later essays, such as "Criticism and Symbolism" (1904). Moreover, he takes the very important step of applying
such symbolizing activity to life as well as art: "from this point of view
the entire world is 'a forest full of symbols,' as Baudelaire put it." But
this activity is not overly rational; symbols also reflect the unity of feeling with reason. 16
Although Bely refined and expanded these views in later essays, to
my knowledge he never confronted directly several theoretical questions that immediately arise and that have a crucial bearing on the
practical creation of Symbolist belles-lettres. An implicit characteristic
of Bely's conception of the symbol is its absolute veracity and reality.
Since it has been imbued with the Absolute, a symbol cannot be anything but a true reflection of some higher order. Furthermore, according to Bely's theory, symbols are the products of individual acts of perception. (He of course does not deny the existence of "public" symbols
that antedate individuals in given cultures and that may float into their
purviews, but he gives them relatively scant attention in his theoretical
writings.) Consequently, first-person "lyrical" narratives in which the
The Symphonies
13
14
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
15
realm where the Lord God Himself wanders wrapped in fog, we read:
"Someone waved to them with a blue iris" (p. 113). But in this case, a
few lines higher, we had been told that God Himself "rocked a blue
iris." Thus, we have a rare instance of the referent being more or less
identified for the reader.
Another device that Bely uses to create an aura of mysterious symbolic significance is made possible by a certain feature of Russian grammar: subjects in sentences can be implied by verbs alone, without any
semantic or syntactic awkwardness. But if a definite subject is not
specified, sentences containing such constructions automatically appear to reveal the actions of agents that remain hidden or occult. Thus,
the phrase propeli molitvu ([they] sang a prayer), repeated twice on
one page, adds to the atmosphere of religious mysticism that permeates
the scenes in which the Princess meets the as yet unsaved Knight (p.
58). It is as if the prayer were being sung b y invisible presences who are
themselves part of the transcendent or supernatural realm. The addition of "somewhere" to the phrase in one instance serves only to further
intensify its meaningful indirection.
In other cases, this effect of suggestiveness is achieved through
an ambiguous relationship between the verbs in question and potential subjects in close proximity to them. The sentence Podavali
znaki
i peregovarivalis'
([they] signaled and conversed), with its implications
of cryptic communication, may refer to the nevedomye
(unknown
ones) in the preceding line, or to some other subject entirely (p. 77).
Even when the context provides a fairly clear idea of the verbs' subjects, the fact that the verb and subject can be separated by varying
lengths of text, often dealing with other topics, still leaves some
ambiguity about the origin of the actions denoted by the verbs:
Vstre-
chali priletaiushchikh
brat'ev ([they] rested in [their] white garments . . . nodded to the disquieting birds. Greeted the brothers
who were flying in). This passage appears on the first page of the
Symphony's fourth part, and there is nothing preceding it to which
these verbs could refer directly. It is true that one can glide
metonymically between these beings clad in white and the "snowwhite flowers of oblivion" which appear a few lines higher on the
page: both are similarly situated on or near water, and both nodthe
former because they are rocked by waves. But several lines further
down from the passage describing the beings we read: "White men and
women followed with exhausted eyes . . . ," suggesting that it may in
fact be they who "rested," "nodded," and "greeted" earlier in the text
(p. 103).
16
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
17
18
Andrei Bely
Bely himself makes this appraisal in his memoir The Beginning of the
Century. He depicts himself at the time he was working on the Symphony as a precocious but still unpracticed writer: "first I precipitate
the rhythm, trying to bring out the sounds by selecting any kind of
words; then I try to color my rhythms; I'm interested in images and not
their verbal formulation; my lexicon is still poor; melody and image,
and nothing else." 21 An imperfect incarnation of an artistic impulse into
language is precisely what seems to characterize Bely s world in the
First Symphony. And the underlying rhythm he claimed had motivated
him was not incarnated in the text in any striking way either, especially
in contrast to the highly rhythmic prose of his major novels.
An enigmatic sphere is one of the more intriguing and successful
symbols that can be found in the work. Its special significance is that it
marks the first appearance of an entire family of symbols that will recur
in several of Bely s later works. The young Knight, while still mired in
evil, participates in dark rites, one of which involves tossing a "hot little sphere" and singing "My sphere, my little sphere." This is known as
"the rite of the spherical terror." We are not told what this sphere represents; possibly, it is some remnant of the "bloody meteor" mentioned
on the same page (p. 52) that fell nearby. There are "old exhalations of
spherical nightmares" associated with the castle near which the meteorite fell, which links the sphere and the meteor. Thus, the sphere's associations bridge evil and the descent of a celestial body to earth, and hint,
however vaguely, at a transcendent that coerces man. Similarly, in the
essay "Symbolism as a World View" (1903), Bely speaks of a falling meteor as an "intrusion of Eternity" that acts as a reminder of the paltriness
of man's state. 22 This anticipates the role that related symbols will play
in three much more important worksthe Second Symphony, Petersburg, and Kotik Letaev.
-3The relation of life to art and reality to fiction was a central concern
for Bely from the start of his career as a theoretician of symbolism. He
explained in the essay "Symbolism as a World View" that symbolism
was not merely an esthetic mode, but a path leading ultimately toward
"life creation." Using Vladimir Soloviev's terminology, he prophesied
that symbolic art would be joined with mysticism to become "theurgy."
And, he continues, "If in symbolism we have the first attempt to show
the eternal in the temporal, then in theurgy we have the end of symbolism. For here we are already speaking of the incarnation of Eternity
through the transfiguration of the resurrected individual." 23
This Solovievian faith in the ability of the new symbolic art to literally transform mankind also explains Bely's ecstatic embrace of Nietzsche in this essay, as well as in later writings. Above all, Bely valued
The Symphonies
19
20
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
21
22
Andrei Bely
of this view. Moreover, the close connection between sound and gesture (assuming it is one Bely actually experienced during his youth, and
not something he projected onto his past from his anthroposophically
influenced perspective thirty years later), viewed in a philosophically
idealistic context, also prefigures the aspect of anthroposophy called
"eurythmy," about which Bely published an entire treatise in 1922 entitled Glossaloliia (sic).
It should be mentioned that Bely s use of Schopenhauer's ideas in his
early essays was clearly very selective: he did not give much attention
to Schopenhauer's concept of the world as representation, or to the philosopher's pessimism (although he would in his Second Symphony). Indeed, in Bely s conception, the subject's interaction (through symbolic
perception) with the world outside himself results in glimpses of Eternity rather than a confrontation with either blind Will, or a solipsistic
screen of illusion generated by the individual.
-4Although Bely called his four early works Symphonies, he made the
highly revealing acknowledgment after writing the first three that their
"structure arose by itself, and I did not have a clear idea of what a 'Symphony' in literature should be." He also confirmed this later in his life
when he recalled that the Symphonies grew out of sequences of "storyless" (bez fabuly) little scenes based on "cosmic" images that appeared
to him, and out of his improvisational themes on the piano, for which
he then created images.32 These avowals do much to explain why the
First Symphony's large-scale structure bears only a superficial resemblance to the sonata form. Indeed, it is possible that Bely derived his generic classification of "symphony" not directly from musical forms but
via Nietzsche, who referred to his most popular work, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, by this term (in an obvious evocation of instrumental music of course).33 The general notion of symphonic music may have appealed to Bely for the same reasons that abstract language did in the
First Symphony. Symphonic music is also abstract, and, at the same
time, lends itself well to a range of emotional interpretations. The spectrum of feelings and attendant inner states that it induces are thus like
the content that a symbol can subsume.
However, there were three other undoubted influences that converged on Bely's Symphonies and left their imprint on the small-scale
structures of the works: Wagner's development of the leitmotif,
Nietzsche's aphoristic style, and the Bible. These are the dominant and
complementary extrinsic models for the unique short paragraph form
of the Symphoniestheir most striking formal characteristica form,
moreover, that can be traced in all of Bely's later works.
The Symphonies
23
Bely characterized his involvement with Wagner during his adolescence as "a mad enthusiasm," 34 an attitude he shared with many major
and minor figures in European and Russian Symbolism. In the case of
Nietzsche, who was also the object of a widespread cult, Bely was not
only seduced by his ideas, but became fascinated by his style from his
earliest contact with it in 1899: "in his aphorisms I see the ultimate in
symbolizing ability: the surprising musicality enslaved me, a musician
in spirit, completely
The philosopher-musician seemed to me
the very type of a symbolist." 35 In fact, in "Symbolism as a World
View," Bely defined "symbol" as "an aphorism charged to the limit." 36
A number of. diary entries from 1901, which were published only recently, help understand exactly why Bely saw a parallel between symbols and aphorisms:
The value of an aphorism is that it allows one to take in at a
glance any horizon, and maintain the relation among the parts.
An aphorism is the most intimate form of contact between the author and the reader . . .
The other valuable feature of a good aphorism is a certain reticence, which is, as it were, like a door that opens onto a further
development of the thought . . .
The aphorism of a sage is a point of departure, but the path
which one follows is already foreseen in that point. 37
Thus, the division of the text of the First Symphony into sequences of
short numbered paragraphs, many consisting of one sentence each,
may be understood as Bely's attempt to employ a syncretic form that
enjoyed the flexibility of leitmotifs, the pointedness of aphorisms, and
the hieratical weight of Biblical verses. But although Bely makes extensive use of leitmotifs by repeating individual numbered short paragraphs in different contexts, and sometimes varying them as well, there
is very little of Nietzsche's pith or laconism in them (to say nothing of
Biblical grandeur). Bely's "verses" resemble Nietzsche's aphorisms only
very superficiallymainly in the way that print is distributed on the
page.
Without the special typographical arrangement, the text of the First
Symphony would read as largely unremarkable prose. However, the
segmentation of the text naturally controls the intonational curve of individual "verses," thereby adding a certain lilt to them. And an intermittent, weak rhythm emerges when "verses," or parts of them, are repeated in close proximity to each other. It may also be possible that
Bely meant the unusual typographical format to suggest the measures
of musical notation.
24
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
25
26
Andrei Bely
in prose" as being "a mixture of Turgenev, Edgar Poe [who had been
translated and first publicized in Europe by Baudelaire, and whose
poems were translated into prose by Mallarm] with everything that
was most left wing and most incomprehensible." 43
It is quite possible, of course, that Bely's early "lyrical fragments" reflect both his own experiments with perception, and the influence of a
popular avant-garde literary form. This supposition would in fact support Lavrov's conclusions (and Bely s admission) that the Symphonies
grew out of an accumulation of smaller pieces. It seems reasonable to
infer that experiments with "seeing Platonic Ideas" in nature, which
Bely claimed to have conducted, should yield results in which the firstperson point of view and immediate personal experiences are dominant. But, as I mentioned, Bely's Symphonies are typically built on alternations between first and third-person points of view. The First, for
example, begins with the narrator's point of view in the Introduction,
shifts to four sequences of verses presented from the third-person, but
with occasional moments of "free indirect discourse," (pp. 21-23), and
then returns to the first-person (pp. 23-24). Comparable shifts exist
both in Turgenev's Senilia, which contains a number of short, storylike pieces with an impersonal narrator, and in Bely's own fragments
(significantly, this characteristic is absent from the prose poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as from Baudelaire). An obvious difference between the Symphonies and Turgenev's "prose poems" is that the latter
do not comprise one long continuous work in terms of subject matter.
However, L. P. Grossman advanced the argument long ago that Senilia
might be seen as a unified cycle constituting a "compositional whole"
a view that potentially brings it even closer to the origins of Bely's Symphonies. 44
The Second Symphony
A person reading Bely's Second Symphony (completed in 1901 and
published in 1902) immediately after the First45 is struck, on the one
hand, by the specificity of the imagery with which it opens, and, on the
other, by the seemingly absurdist manner in which disparate images are
yoked together in its first part. In sharp contrast to the conventional
narrative beginning of the First Symphony, with its description of the
old King's death in bland and abstract imagery, the Second opens vigorously with a cityscape composed of an agglomeration of fragments:
1. It was a time of suffocating toil. The roadway gleamed
blindingly.
2. Coachmen rattled by, presenting their worn, blue backs to
the hot sun.
3. Unembarrassed by the grimaces of passersby, yardmen
raised dust in columns, their brown-dusty faces guffawing.
The Symphonies
27
28
Andrei Bely
hears in the Symphony) appear to be Bely's nods toward Schopenhauer's canonization of music in The World as Will and
Representation
as the expression of the Absolute Will, or the ultimate thing-in-itself.
(Even though Schopenhauer did not locate the Will in the heavens, the
sky is the naif s traditional locus for the otherworldly, which is what
Bely plays with.) Thus, the multifarious things, beings, and actions
Bely intentionally yokes together into seemingly nonsensical pairs and
clusters can be understood as dramatizations of Schopenhauer's belief
that the Will is the ultimate driving force behind all phenomena,
whether laws of physics, animal instincts, or human behavior. This is
also the implication of a phrase that recurs a number of times in the
work: "misty Eternity was reflected in the flow of time" (p. 143).
The unattractive character of the world and its domination by ceaseless repetitions that induce deep boredom also echo Schopenhauer's
profoundly pessimistic view of existence. Because the Will is an endless, blind urge or striving, it can never be satisfied permanently. Happiness in human beings is merely the temporary satisfaction of desire,
which is quickly replaced by boredom, then by desire once again. Relations among the characters in the Second Symphony's first part are
largely abrasive and disharmonious, further reflecting Schopenhauer's
belief that conflict typifies the manifestation of the Will in the phenomenal realm, and that each living creature attempts to assert itself at the
expense of others.
A number of individual vignettes display even more obvious distillations of Schopenhauer's essential ideas. Both the special motive force of
the Will (expressed as music), and the conflict among human beings
who respond to its blind urgings, are encapsulated in the following
scene:
1. The day was ending. Military music was playing on Prechistinsky Boulevard, it's not known why, and to the Boulevard came
many inhabitants of houses and basements, it's not known from
where. They walked back and forth on the Boulevard. They
stood before the music, crowding and pushing each other, (p.
132)
Bely even plays with the Kantian Ding-an-Sich, which Schopenhauer
transformed into his Will, in the depiction of a concert:
1. And now it began . . . deepened . . . arose . . . as if these
were musical scales from an unknown world, arising from no one
knows where, dying away.
2. As if this was by itself [samo po sebe], and those trumpeting
and bowing were by themselves [samipo sebe], (pp. 182-183)
However, although Schopenhauer provides a conceptual framework
that orders and makes intelligible the seemingly absurdist successions
The Symphonies
29
of images and plot fragments in the Symphony's first part, he is not the
key to the work as a whole. In fact, the first part differs significantly
from the other three largely because in them Bely abandons the philosophy of Schopenhauer in favor of Solovievian apocalypticism.
But despite the resulting ideological or philosophical disjunction, Bely s symbolic method remains the same throughout, and represents a
significant advance over the First Symphony. Instead of the vaguely
mysterious forces and presences of the First, in the Second Bely provides glimmers from the otherworldly realm, which, although seen
darklyprincipally by the narrator in the first part, and then by several characters and the narrator in the later partsare still compelling.
Moreover, Bely continues to fill his world in the Second with concrete
objects and detailed images, not the highly abstract locales or things
that typify the First. The result is a much more convincingly wrought
fictional world.
Satisfaction with this and other aspects of the Second Symphony
must have moved Bely to include it thirty years later among his half
dozen best works. In the Second Symphony Bely indeed found a balance between noumenal suggestiveness and phenomenal specificity
that is comparable to the achievement of his later major novels. He also
succeeded in creating a narrative form that departs from nineteenthcentury norms more drastically than did the First Symphony, and that
demands to be read in a new way. Rather than being presented with a
unified narrative consciousness, the reader has to put together the unifying, deeper meaning of the work from details scattered across the
work's motley surface. 46
-2-
30
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
31
how clearly they perceive it, and, more important, in their attitude toward it.
The question then arises of how part one is related to the other three
parts of the Symphony. Whereas numerous microplots were juxtaposed in part one, the remaining three parts have a much less nervous
texture because they are concerned largely with several major interrelated plot lines. To be sure, some characters are carried over from part
one. The "fairytale" (skazka)the narrator's name for the beautiful but
empty society woman to whom Musatov is drawnis the most notable example because of the role she will play in Musatov's misguided eschatology in part two. But basically Bely abandons the Schopenhauerian world view after the first part and replaces it with one derived from
Nietzsche and Soloviev. The consequence is that the first part seems incompletely attached to the rest of the Symphony.
Nevertheless, several bridges do cross the gap. In most abstract
terms, the world views in the first and later parts are congruent. An essentially passive attitude toward cosmic events is held up as correct in
the last three parts. Thus, the implicitly deterministic atmosphere of
part one is preserved later in the Symphony as well, although for different reasons.
Another connection between the parts may be inferred from Bely's
conception of the history of nineteenth-century European philosophy,
as well as from the evolution of his philosophical outlook in the period
immediately preceding his work on the Second Symphony. Given his
passionate, life-long concern with uniting thought, feeling, and deed, it
is not surprising that these two developments should parallel each other. In the essay "Symbolism as a World View," Bely began with Schopenhauer when he spoke of antecedents for his own conception of symbolism. Although Schopenhauer's philosophy was pessimistic, it was
widely popular, and, "as the pessimism was coming to the surface, an
ever-increasing relief was felt in a frank acknowledgment of all the horrors of existence." This "recent" phase was the one Bely embodied in the
first part of the Second Symphony, I would argue. But the historically
important role of Schopenhauer passed, and "Pessimism turned out to
be a furnace that consumed self-satisfied vulgarity [poshlost']." Nietzsche, Hartmann, and Soloviev are the next important figures; in Bely's
view they all advanced beyond Schopenhauer, who was, nevertheless,
a necessary precursor. In his conception of tragedy, Nietzsche reconciled the antinomy between the Will and representation, and propounded the unified personality of the overman as the goal of historical
evolution. In Hartmann's "unconscious" Bely finds a confluence of the
metaphysical Will with the world of phenomena. Furthermore, the
goal of the historical process for Hartmann is also the revelation of the
32
Andrei Bely
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33
34
Andrei Bely
These errors are not a simple case of Musatov's confusing matter for
spirit; there is evidence that another agency interfered in his life. In any
event, it is instructive to recall Bely's early theoretical formulation in
"The Forms of Art" about the correct epistemological stance that symbolic art requires (even though this formulation appears to have been
superseded by his practice in the Second Symphony): it is not enough
to see objects, one must learn "to understand the eternal meaning, the
idea in images." In Musatov's case, his overly eager anticipation of the
Second Coming leads to imbalance, and he projects his solipsistic desires onto an aspect of external reality instead of perceiving what lies
outside himself.
Moreover, Musatov's error is not wholly invented by the author. In
Bely's "Instead of a Foreword to the Second Symphony," a text that has
been widely (and sometimes inappropriately) cited in the critical literature because it appears to provide a key to his intentions, he speaks of
satire as being the second of the three levels of meaning in his work. 5 1
He explains that "here are ridiculed certain excesses [italics mine] of
mysticism" and recommends that those readers who doubt the existence
of his satirical targets "scrutinize surrounding reality more closely"
(pp. 125-126).
It is quite clear from his memoirs whom Bely had in mind when he
said this. After Vladimir Soloviev died in 1900, his brother Mikhail
Sergeevich hesitated to publish fragments from the philosopher's unfinished essays that touched on his mystical experiences of Divine Wisdom. The reason was Mikhail Sergeevich's fear that new publications
might feed the imagination of a certain Anna Schmidt, a "half-crazed"
woman from Nizhny Novgorod who had decided that she was the
"world soul" that had inspired Vladimir Soloviev. According to Bely,
Mikhail Sergeevich feared the birth of a mystical sect based on his
brother's teachings and influenced by Schmidt's "ravings." "My first
book, 'The [Second] Symphony'," Bely explained, "was filled with echoes of these fears in the form of parodies of the sect":
the image of Sergei Musatov is the image of a follower of Soloviev that has been pointed and caricatured to the extreme of sectarianism; individuals like him appeared in Schmidt's sect; in the
"Symphony" I only caricatured Schmidt, depicting what would
happen if V. S. Soloviev agreed with the ravings of his insane follower.52
It is likely that the last phrase in this quotation is at least in part a bone
thrown to the Soviet censors. Vladimir Soloviev himself appears on the
pages of the Second Symphony in an unassailable aureole of mystical
affection, and clearly differentiates himself from Musatov. Thus, one
The Symphonies
35
can only assume that in his memoir Bely was trying to play down his
passionate attachment to Soloviev, in a continual, politically expedient
attempt to disassociate himself from the otherworldly preoccupations
of his youth.
This inference is supported by Bely's revealing remark in an unpublished autobiography that he "experienced exactly what Musatov, the
hero of my second 'symphony' experienced; the second 'symphony/ a
chance fragment, is almost a protocol transcription of that authentic,
enormous symphony that I experienced over a number of months during this year [1901]." Bely's avowal has the additional interest of showing that he consciously melded his life and art. The woman whom Bely
idolized at the time was Margarita Kirillovna Morozova, confidante of
the avant-garde, and wife of a wealthy manufacturer. He describes his
platonic infatuation with her, and perception of her as Soloviev's Divine Wisdom, in his narrative poem The First Encounter (1921). 5 3
Of course Musatov is not a simple translation of Anna Schmidt. He
appears attractive at first, and ends not as a completely ludicrous figure, but with something of a tragic pall over him. This is due in part to
the original grandeur of his design. More important in defining him,
however, is that Bely presents him as an unwitting plaything of a great
cosmic process.
Bely plants this information quite subtly. From his earliest appearances in the text Musatov is repeatedlybut only implicitlycontrasted
with an old Orthodox priest who closely watches those who speak at
the gatherings of mystics with his "intelligent blue eyes," but who, most
significantly, "listens more than speaks" (p. 204). His passive, silent
presence throughout much of the Symphony is his distinguishing characteristic. It is also antipodal to Musatov's active, self-confident, and
willful theurgy. As the narrator describes it, Musatov's desire in relation to his followers is to "diligently blow into their hearts a sorrow
about fiery storms, so that they would become enflamed with sorrow
and be consumed by love" (pp. 2 4 1 - 2 4 2 ) . And when the deceased Soloviev speaks of Musatov in the end of the fourth part, he specifically
mentions Musatov's "pridefulness" and "self-confidence" (p. 313).
The significance of the old priest's behavior is that it reflects the
"knowing passivity" of figures in the Symphony who are clearly presented by the narrator as Bearers of the Truth. Indeed, an unspecified
personage, designated at first simply as "the passive and knowing one,"
early in part one repeats from "up above" the city the condemnatory
epithet "pig-sty" (p. 142). The "passive and knowing one" also reappears later in part one and exclaims "Thus, thus, o Lord! I know you!"
(p. 195). Later still the same figure expresses displeasure with the mis-
36
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
37
cations, Eternity whispers to him: "I was joking . . . So, you joke
also . . . we all joke" (p. 300). One can only conclude from this that Musatov is intentionally made the butt of a cosmic practical joke, perhaps
as a sort of karmic punishment for his excessive (the word is repeated
numerous times by the narrator in relation to Musatov) love for his
apocalyptic design. This is why he comes close to being an undeserving
and essentially innocent victim. His fall is ultimately too ludicrous,
however, for him to be a true tragic figure.
There may be something of Bely's own deeply felt childhood experience behind Musatov's fate. In his memoirs, Bely often returned to
what he designated as his "scissors problem." He meant by this the profound trauma he had experienced as a childof being torn between
parents with antipodal characters and interests, and of his consequent
and constant sense of "guiltless guilt" for following the precepts of one
instead of the other. This experience led him to identify himself with
Christ, and seems to have been sufficiently seminal to have lasted into
adulthood, when it was fed by the Christological orientation of anthroposophy. The motif of the innocent victim also reappears in all of Bely's
works of belles lettres, and is dramatized with special poignancy in the
autobiographical novels Kotik Letaev and The Baptized
Chinaman.
Deceptive Eternity also tries to impart an idea to Musatov that is
both Nietzschean, and, within the context of the Second Symphony,
demonic. Eternity whispers to him more than once that "All returns,"
and further confides that "All essence is in the visible. Reality is in
dreams . . . A great sage . . . A great fool . . . All is one" (pp. 2 5 3 254). This statement is somewhat muddled. Nevertheless, Nietzsche's
idea of the Eternal Return is conflated in it with what Musatov hears
from bizarre creatures in the end of part four.
Musatov has had a lot to drink before he goes to them, but their supernatural and malevolent, rather than merely illusory, character is
confirmed by the narrator (p. 305) as well as by the quiet old priest (p.
318). 5 7 One of the demonic beings repeats the Nietzschean formula
"that all returns" (p. 307). But the being then undermines the idea's possible applicability to the Second Coming (which is a connection Bely
himself made in his theoretical writings) by adding that "the fourth dimension" is a continuation of this world, and that there is nothing different "beyond the wall" (p. 309). (This is also the essence of the comments made at a crucial juncture in The Silver Dove by Sukhorukov, a
character who is unequivocally demonic.) The demonic being's remark
is of course an explicit attack on all otherworldly beliefs, and is particularly perverse because the one who uttered it claims to be "a thing-in-itself" (p. 308). (By contrast, later in the fourth part the narrator says in a
scene describing Father John and the "passive and knowing one": "it
38
Andrei Bely
taev.
The Symphonies
39
adds the qualifying remark "But this is only how it seemed" to the statement about the horn. This is an obvious attempt to augment the apocalyptic suggestiveness of the scene he is fashioning by undermining the
certainty of the physical perception in a naive manner reminiscent of
the First Symphony. This device is still common in the Second, where
Bely often prefaces some portentous, symbolic vision with "as if"
(tochno). But by adding the remark, Bely also introduces another,
more human point of viewone less certain of the reality of Soloviev's
supernatural presence. Thus the narrative voice is complicated from
the start by being given a second dimension.
Immediately after this passage, Bely begins a new short sequence of
numbered "verses," which is his usual (but not exclusive) method of signaling a transition to a new topic or point of view:
1. A heavy, interplanetary sphere came flying in, it's not
known from where.
2. Whistling, it sliced into the earths atmosphere, and glowing
hot, emitted sheaves of sparks from itself.
3. From below it seemed that a large flashing star had tumbled
from the blue sky.
4. A white band remained in the sky, fading quickly in the cold.
5. The one sitting by the samovar saw, yes he saw the star, and
took it into account.
Following this, the narrator shifts to a six-"verse"-long sequence
treating meteorological phenomena that are actually part of "the question of the sacred meaning of Russia" (pp. 195-196). As a result,
through mtonymie contiguity, the arrival of the "interplanetary
sphere" in the earth's atmosphere is twice associated with the apocalyptic fate of the worldthe first time by means of Soloviev's harbinger
trumpet call, the second by the question about Russian national destiny.
The rapid shifts in point of view thus begin with the "passive and
knowing one's" quiet contemplation of God. Then the narrative moves
to a privileged, superior perception of the summoning sound of the
horn and the man in the "caped cloak" (who is Vladimir Soloviev, as we
learn later in the Symphony); and to the narrator's attempt to blur
these perceptions through the suggestion that they were only "seeming." This is followed by a privileged narrator's description of the interplanetary sphere, but from a different vantage point, one high above
the earth's surface, and modified by a recognition of personal limitation: the narrator does not know everything since he does not know
where the sphere is from. Next, the point of view shifts to the earth's
surface, from which the privileged narrator describes the sphere in the
way a naive observer might see itas a "flashing star" whose trail fades
40
Andrei Bely
in the sky. Immediately after this, the point of view shifts to the "passive and knowing one" internalizing the fact of the "shooting star." Finally, at the beginning of the next numbered sequence, the superior,
elevated narrators point of view takes over again.
The narrative thus leaps among a series of planes of different but related realities: the earthbound, material, human one; the supernatural,
mystical one of the deceased Vladimir Soloviev's apocalyptic trumpeting, which also implies shifts between human and Eternal time; that of
a superior observer hanging above the earth, but whose perceptions
occur within the limits of conventional astronomy; and one that is only
hinted at here (although it is developed more fully in later works), of
the self-conscious craftsman of the text itself. The segmentation of the
text into numbered "verses" naturally enhances such shifts in point of
view.
The movement among these (and other) planes of reality implies
their synchronic coexistence in the Second Symphony's world and in
the mind of that world's creator. Moreover, the planes of these separate
realities intersect, and, as a result, define a unique world that encompasses a range of phenomena (and spiritual dimensions)a world in
which any single event is illuminated fully only when it is seen from a
variety of earthly as well as transcendent perspectives. 59 A belletristic
tactic such as this clearly increases the polysemy of the image at the
point of intersection of the various planes to the extent of making it
into a symbol.
Bely also shifts rapidly among different planes of existence when the
planes are not contiguous. Or, to use Jakobsons seminal distinction,
metaphoric transitions abound in Bely's prose as well as mtonymie
ones.60
Metaphoric shifts follow the important scene of the "fairytale" telling
Musatov that her child is actually a little girl and not the male world
savior Musatov expected. Immediately following her light-hearted revelation, we read:
8. The little sunset laughed like a small child, all red, all giddy.
9. The building put up on a shaky foundation collapsed; the
walls fell down raising dust.
10. A knife stabbed into the loving heart, and crimson blood
began to pour into the sorrowful chalice, (p. 298)
The curiously diminutive proto-apocalyptic image in number 8 echoes
the idea that Musatov was the butt of a cosmic joke. Sentences 9 and 10
contain conventional images of pain and destroyed hopes, but with the
added suggestion in number 10 that Musatov was a sacrificial victim in
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41
42
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
43
44
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
45
(ideino-simvolicheskii).
The latter is the predominant one, Bely adds,
and the combination of all three in one passage "leads to symbolism."
Since Bely spoke of symbolism in his early theoretical essays as an attempt to see the "Idea" in an image, his emphasis on the "ideal-symbolic"
side of the Second Symphony may be a specific reference to the firstperson perceptions of the narrator-author. These are quite obvious in
the work. The only meaning that remains to be discussed therefore is
the "musical."
By the musical side of his "symphony" Bely meant two interconnected features: "the expression of a series of moods, tied together by a
fundamental mood"; and the consequent necessity of dividing the work
"into parts, parts into fragments, and fragments into verses (musical
phrases); the frequent repetition of certain musical phrases underscores
this division."
The "fundamental mood" of the Second Symphony is an expectation
of something portentous. This encompasses the Schopenhauerian first
part with its references to Eternity and a lowering sky, as well as the remaining three, in which apocalyptic expectation is presented in both its
satirical and sacral forms. As for what Bely had in mind when he spoke
about a "series of moods" that this fundamental mood overarches, one
can infer that the emotional colorations of prose passages must be analogous to those in the sections of large-scale musical compositions such
as the sonata form. The first part is dominated by brief, atomistic vignettes that together with the Schopenhauerian background combine
to form a predominantly grey, oppressive, disjointed picture of Moscow. (The image of the "fairytale" is of course a different tonality that
foreshadows the latter three parts.) The atmosphere of the second part
is dominated by a mocking, sardonic narrative presentation of various
Moscow mystics, countered by a warmer, exulting anticipation of the
transfiguration of the world. These two main currents also interweave
to form the remaining two parts of the Second Symphony. 68
Understanding the importance of "mood" as an organizing principle
helps explain the role of one striking, but otherwise enigmatic character in the Symphonythe little nun at the cemetery. She appears several times in the text, but is not attached to any of the major or minor
plot lines. She is, however, juxtaposed (contrapuntally?) with the "fairytale"the object of Musatov's misguided mystical expectationsand is
characterized by a febrile, insatiable longing that is clearly religious:
9. One could hear the swifts shrilling, and the little nun was being consumed disinterestedly [bestsel'no] in the gleam of the sunset.
1. Again, and again, the young beauty in her spring outfit
walked among the graves . . .
46
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
47
discontinuous than it had been in most of the Second Symphony, especially in its first part, and to bring it closer to that of Bely's later works.
This purely formal change is a reflection of the dominant thematic
feature of the Third Symphonya lengthy, unmediated depiction of a
transcendent realm, something that distinguishes it from all of Bely's
later works. The entire first part, and the last two pages of the final,
third part, take place in a dimension other than the terrestrialone
which the reader is shown directly, and not through a "window" that
opens briefly in the narrator's or a character's consciousness, and then
shuts again. The multifaceted reality Bely portrayed in the Second
Symphony by leaping among different planes of being or points of
view in the space of short passages still exists in the Third, but is presented entirely differently and more calmly. Because the reader is given
a view of the transcendent bases for terrestrial events in one continuous
sequence of scenes, it is no longer necessary for the narrator to interrupt a description of terrestrial events with fragmentary glimpses of the
otherworldly realm. This happens nowhere else in Bely's oeuvre, suggesting that the tactic was both experimental and not overly successful
in the author's own eyes.
The story in the Third Symphony is very simple, especially in comparison to the Second with its numerous minor subplots and vignettes
about the city. The first part, much of which has the character of a vision or a dream by the narrator, describes a Child living by an abstract
seashore in an atemporal otherworldly realm. The Child is the protg
of a wise Old Man who charts the paths of the stars and is associated
with Eternity. Then an enormous Sea Serpent and its demon companion come on shore, and the Old Man explains to the Child that he, the
Child, must now undergo yet another incarnation.
Part two opens with Evgeny Khandrikov (the name is derived from
khandra, Russian for "spleen"), a master's degree candidate in chemistry, awakening in his apartment. All during the day he is haunted by
dozens of vague recollections and symbolic perceptions of a realm beyond the phenomenal that the reader immediately recognizes derive
from the Child's life in part one. In order to escape the threats of a Professor Tsenkh, who bears unmistakable characteristics of the Serpent's
demon companion, Khandrikov seeks the protection of the psychiatrist Doctor Orlov, who, in turn, resembles the Old Man, and whose
name is derived from the Russian word for "eagle"the Old Man's
symbol and avatar. In the third part, Khandrikov escapes the threats of
Tsenkh and the Serpent, which appears in the terrestrial guise of a train,
by tipping over his rowboat on a lake. Although Bely does not make a
point of overtly contrasting matter and spirit in the Second Symphony,
Khandrikov's longing to escape from the earth of everyday material
48
Andrei Bely
phenomena to the realm he knew in his avatar as Child strongly suggests a Gnostic component in the world Bely fashioned. The final pages
show the Child being welcomed by the Old Man on the seashore of part
one. 70
Numerous details make it perfectly clear that Khandrikov is the reincarnation of the Child, and that Khandrikov's life, in all essential respects, is a translation of the Child's situation to earth. 71 In terms of
musical structure, one might think of the sections dealing with events
in the otherworldly realm as a melodic line that becomes punctuated by
chords in the section dealing with Khandrikov "on earth," when he experiences intermittent symbolic perceptions and sees the otherworldly
underpinnings of phenomena; this adds otherworldly notes to the terrestrial ones, as it were.
The dominant concept underlying the entire work, and suggested in
the title itself (The Return. Ill Symphony), is the Eternal Return of
Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Indeed, even the layout of the text
on the page in the Third Symphony resembles closely the design of
Nietzsche's book, especially such numbered sections as Zarathustra's
Foreword in the First Part. However, Bely remains true to his own
eclectic syncretism, and modifies Nietzsche's idea by adding to it an element that is, strictly speaking, antithetical to Nietzsche's entire world
viewnamely, a supernatural realm in which the psyche of the individual who will have to go through yet another life cycle remains until
such time as it descends to earth. This is directly contrary to Nietzsche's
concept, which rejects the creation of different worlds and insists on
the re-creation of the individual and his world totally unchanged.72
Another, equally radical modification of Nietzsche's ideas is proposed in the early essay "Symbolism as a World View." Bely here refers
approvingly to the interpretation of Lev Shestov, the Russian philosopher, that in Nietzsche's concept of the "eternal return" one must stress
"eternity" and not "return." "In this light," Bely writes, "the eternal return . . . is the return of Eternity," by which he meant God. Nietzsche
failed to see this because of the confusion in his "methods of cognition."73
Much else in the Third Symphony is derived from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Child and the Old Man share features with Zarathustra
himself and repeat some of his pronouncements. The Child recalls the
child that Zarathustra proclaims as the final and highest metamorphosis of the spirit, after the camel and the lion: "The child is innocence and
forgetting, a new beginning . . . . the spirit now wills his own will." The
Sea Serpent, the Child's opponent, recalls the "great dragon" named
"Thou shalt"the sum of all forces that try to prevent existential selfcreationof whom Zarathustra speaks when describing the obstacles
The Symphonies
49
that the spirit undergoing metamorphoses must overcome in its struggle for self-definition and the creation of new values. 7 4 This correlates
well with the narrator's explanation that Khandrikov's struggle with
Tsenkh is the beginning of his "final struggle for independence" (p. 87).
Within the context of the Symphony, however, the Child's struggle is
for independence from the necessity of repeated rebirths, which is suggested by the Old Man when the Child finally returns to the supernatural realm in the end of the third part (p. 125). The Child's and Old Man's
life by a cave overlooking the sea, the Old Man's association with an
eagle and eternity, and much of his rhetoric directed at the Child about
having to descend, or encountering the desert, or remaining faithful to
the earth, are also derived from Thus Spoke
Zarathustra.75
-2-
Given the importance of eschatology in all of Bely s works, the question naturally arises, what is the relation in the Third Symphony between cyclical and rectilinear conceptions of time? Or, how can the
Eternal Return be reconciled with a view of time that begins in Genesis
and ends with the Second Coming? These broader questions also have
a direct bearing on Bely's conception of the relation between man's
earthly time and the Eternal transcendent. Indeed, these are the central
questions posed implicitly by the entire Third Symphony.
They are also raised explicitly in a confrontation of central importance that takes place at a dinner party in honor of Khandrikov's successful defense of his master's thesis. Tsenkh offers a toast to "those
manifestations of culture, which, being firmly linked to science, proudly speed human genius along the endless rails of progress" (p. 79). The
entire scene is played out in paragraphs that resemble normal prose,
rather than the more aphoristic, short-paragraph form of the rest of the
work. This departure from the norm does not appear to be motivated
by anything discernible in the text, but it inevitably calls attention to
the content of the passages.
Khandrikov objects to Tsenkh s seemingly innocuous, conventional
toast on several grounds. First of all, he is opposed to Tsenkh's facile
hopes for a progressive "development of social consciousness" (obshchestvennykh
interesov) because this neglects the necessity of personal change. One can see here a glimmer of Nietzsche's concept of the
overman, and, more generally, of Bely's life-long aspirations for his
own and mankind's self-transcendence. Furthermore, Khandrikov is
opposed to social equality because this will lead to stasis: contrasts
cause human beings to strive. He uses the terminology of thermodynamics to express his reason, which sounds much like the Biblical con-
50
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
51
in any of Bely s other works either, although they can be found in absolutely staggering detail in the writings of Rudolf Steiner. This must
have been one of the features of anthroposophy that attracted Bely so
strongly in 1912 and in later yearsa topic to which I shall return in
connection with Petersburg.
The sum of Bely's implicit answer to Khandrikov's hypothesizing is
what we learn of Khandrikov's own life: man exists in a deterministic
universe and undergoes a spiral-shaped development consisting of a series of reincarnations. He can be said to exist in the past and in the future to the extent that, through memory and premonition, he has both
glimpses of a previous existence and the fate that lies ahead.
This schema is subsumed within a vaguely Christian context. The
Child's mentor, the Old Man, speaks of God's will in relation to the
planetary cycles that he charts (p. 9). Cherubim appear more than once
in the Child's otherworldly realm (p. 11). And a severe figure with a fiery sword guards Eden (p. 16). Most revealing, however, is that the
Child is associated with Christ's passion. The Old Man places a wreath
of scarlet roses, or "bloody flames," as it is also described, on the
Child's head and tells him "I crown you with suffering" (p. 37). Moreover, Khandrikov's "drowning"rendered brilliantly by Belyleads
to his "resurrection" as the Child once again. And the Old Man greets
him with: "Many times I crowned you with sufferingits burning
flames. And now for the first time I place upon you these stars of silver.
Now you have come, and will not descend [ne zakatish'sia]" (p. 125).
The "stars of silver" are a wreath of white roses.
Bely's color symbolism and the Old Man's words are quite clear by
themselves. But it is worth noting that in the essay on "Sacred Colors,"
which is roughly contemporaneous with the Third Symphony, Bely explicitly identified the color white as the "symbol of the incarnated fullness of being," that is, of the Divinity. The color red, however, denotes
not only hellfire, but also the blood of Christ's suffering and sacrifice. 78
Thus, the segment of the Child's cyclical existence that the reader is allowed to witness begins with a reincarnation colored by Christ's torment, and ends with an apotheosis that crowns fulfillment.
Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Return is conflated in the Third Symphony with the story of Christ. In this conception man experiences a
finite number of reincarnations, rather than being condemned to return
eternally. And rather than being a unique and central event in human
and cosmic history, Christ's passion is in a sense the lot of every man. 79
Circular time and rectilinear time are thus reconciled in a finite spiral.
As for Khandrikov's implied question about the relation of the human
spiral of development to that of the material universe, or "the atoms" as
52
Andrei Bely
he puts itBely provides no answer. But since anthroposophy does address this question in elaborate detail, it is probable that Bely found his
answer there. 80
Because of the formal division in the Third Symphony between the
Child's and Khandrikov's realms, it might seem that Bely had abandoned the more complex multiplanar view of existence that he had depicted in the Second Symphony and would repeat with variations in his
later works. But this is not actually the case. Although the Third lacks
the nervous segmentation of the narrative into short passages dealing
with different planes in a physico-spiritual reality, or with perceptions
from different vantage points, there are suggestions that each of the
two worlds is itself hierarchically layered, and that the protagonist, the
Child-Khandrikov, passes between more than two planes. This is important for understanding Bely's w o r k because it shows that he created
variations on his characteristic apprehension of existence.
Most often, the Child-Khandrikov passes between different planes
of being by means of dreams. This is the mode of transition between
parts one and two of the Symphony, when the Child goes to sleep in the
end of one, and Khandrikov wakes up in the beginning of the other.
Similarly, in part one, the Child seems to pass into the yet higher
plane of the Old Man when he falls asleep: "There, where the stone had
been [the 'stone that looked like a man,' p. 8], the Old Man was sitting.
He turned his inexpressible face to the sleeping Child" (p. 9). We then
see that the Child "awakens" (p. 11); but he reassures himself, apparently when he sees the Old Man, that he is seeing nothing but dreams
(p. 12). Nonetheless, the Child is then actually touched by the Old M a n
and speaks to him, at which point the narrator says that the Old M a n
"bent down toward the sleeping one" (p. 12). But when the Child
"rubbed his blue eyes," he still saw the Old Man (p. 13) and drifted off
again. Finally,
The Child awoke. The Old Man had disappeared. Sadly he remembered the nocturnal visitation.
He glanced in the direction where the white stone had stuck
out. The stone was gone.
A sudden high tide had carried it into the sea, in order to throw
it out again . . .
(p. 13)
The dreams within a dream in this sequence of passages foreshadow
Senator Ableukhov's double dream in Petersburg, which also translated him into higher planes of being and put him into contact with the
spirit world.
The Symphonies
53
Later in the first part, the Child is awake when he sees the Old Man,
but the latter remains aloof and does not speak to him. He does so only
when he is climbing high into the mountains with the Child following
behind (p. 19). It may have been merely a slip on Bely's part that in this
instance he abandoned the dream as a means of transition into the Old
Man's realm. On the other hand, there is evidence in the Symphony
that dreams are not temporary journeys in other worlds, but real passageways into themwhich is what Khandrikov discovers. Thus it
may be that dreams are no longer mentioned in connection with the
Child and the Old Man, because the Child has "dreamed himself" into
the higher realm of greater cosmic awareness that the Old Man inhabits.
If we imagine a loop in the spiral that consists of the incarnation of
the Child as Khandrikov, and then Khandrikov's "drowning" and reappearance as the Child, the Child's dreams may have moved him along a
segment of that loop in the direction of the higher awareness that the
Old Man seems to possess. In other words, the dreams seem to translate the Child not only from the lower states to higher onesin a twodimensional planebut along the third dimension of the spiral's axis as
well.
This pattern of a temporal development combined with a cyclical
component is further suggested by a comment the narrator makes
about the Child shortly before he goes to sleep to wake up as Khandrikov. The Child is watching man-like marine creatures (one of several
farcical touches in the work), obviously derived from Bcklin's canvasses, cavorting in the water: "With surprise the Child looked at a
form of life that quite recently had been hidden from his gaze, sadly remembering his former acquaintance who had descended" (p. 41). Ii seeing what had been invisible before is a sign of advancement, and if the
creatures are a lower, more bestial form of life than the Child, then this
scene represents another bit of progress on the Child's part, even if the
progress must be understood as equivalent to a "fortunate fall." Movement along a spiral that is itself tilted "upward" can of course be imagined as requiring relative descents as well as ascents.
Khandrikov has similar dreams. In the course of his normal life he
sees an old man who seems "completely unique" (p. 64), but he cannot
remember where he had seen him before. Then in a dream he experiences the Child's seaside world and encounters the Old Man who assures him that his ordeal will not last long (p. 70). In this sequence of
passages Khandrikov also wakes up twice: after the first time he sees
the Old Man departing, and after the second, he is back in his familiar,
physical world. However, the mundane world has changed irreversibly
for him, as if he had passed into another, higher dimension of it, or
54
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
55
56
Andrei Bely
an essay when he spoke of art as being the "joining of two orders of successions"the one internal, and the other external. 8 4
In the prefatory remarks to the Symphony, Bely also mentions parenthetically that by inner experiences he means "mystical" ones. The
full significance of this laconic aside becomes clear only in the context
of Bely s theoretical essays. The presence of some third agencyin addition to the perceiving subject and the perceived object (or "image of
the visible" as he puts it)was implied in Bely s conception of the symbol in his earliest essays by references to the "eternal"or "Platonic" ideas
that are underscored in images when symbols are created. 8 5 In other
words, creating a symbol somehow puts the perceiver-creator into
touch with the transcendent. Bely maintained this view in essays he
wrote during and after his work on the Fourth Symphony. But as the
Second Symphony shows, he was also clearly inclining toward making
the transcendent dominant in both correct and erroneous perceptions.
In "The Meaning of Art," Bely identifies eight types of symbolism depending on where a "certain real unity," which he also calls God, manifests itself. For example, God can reveal Himself to the artist in an "image of the visible" as a man or an animal, awakening a corresponding
inner experience in the artist. The artist then fashions this vision of God
in some material form. Bely calls this interrelationship among the three
elements "symbolic realism," and finds it to be the origin of the artistic
images of Olympic deities. But other interrelations are also possible,
and the artist may begin by focusing on some aspect of the visible
world which then awakens a certain inner experience in him. This experience deepens the artistic perception, and, as a result, the given aspect
of the visible world is transformed. The artist creates the symbol by recreating through the medium of his art the perception that has been
transformed by his inner experience. The resulting symbol is for him a
revelation of "a certain hidden essence"; and the revelation in this case
occurs during the creative act itself and not prior to it. In this instance,
the artist does not see the created symbol as an exact recreation of an
inner truth, but as a hint of it. Bely mentions Raphael's Madonnas and
portraits by Drer and Holbein the Younger as examples of this type of
symbolism. 86
This latter schema is essentially a refinement of Bely's conception of
symbolism found in his earlier essays. It still attaches the symbolic perception to an absolute, spiritual realm as definitively as the former
schema, "symbolic realism." The other types of symbolism Bely outlines in the essay also anchor the creation of symbols to the transcendent.
This even-handed, "scientific" categorization of symbolism in "The
Meaning of Art" is somewhat misleading as far as Bely's own artistic
T h e Symphonies
57
practice is concerned (and it is interesting to note that he does not specify in the essay which category applies to his own works). In the Fourth
Symphony his point of departure, as he put it, was the "inner experiences underlying . . . the background of daily life," for which he then
tried to select appropriate images. But no matter what his own theoretical and methodological preference was, in the final reckoning symbolism for Bely always came down to the name for the cognitive practice
that expresses (and constitutes) man's link to the otherworldly. He
makes this especially clear in a m a j o r later essay: "in our feelings we
live in many worlds; we feel not only what we see and touch, but what
we have never seen with our eyes, n o r apprehended with our sense organs; in these unknown, inexpressible feelings the world of transcendent reality opens up before us, full of demons, souls and deities; feelings obligate us to be mystics." 8 7 This, then, is the fuller meaning of
Bely's passing remark in his prefatory comments to the Fourth S y m phonythat the inner experiences with which he is concerned are
"mystical."
A partial clarification of the unexpected "path of analysis" Bely
claims to have followed in the Fourth S y m p h o n y can be found in his
memoirs. While in Munich in 1906, he began to rewrite the nearly finished work,
dreaming about various technical tricks, such as doing with the
material of the phrases what Wagner had done with melody. I
imagined the themes as a strong rhythmic line [myslil tematiku
strogoiu liniei ritma]; the subsidiary themestwo w o m e n , an
"angel" and a "demon"merging into one in the soul of the hero,
not according to the laws of logic, but of counterpoint.
But the story [fabula] would not submit to the formula. I saw the
story as monolithic, but the formula fragmented it into two
worlds: the world of the hallucinations of a consciousness, and
the material one. T h e confluence of these artificial worlds incarnated illusions, and, at the same time, dissociated the stuff of everyday life. T h e story itself was n o w being reborn into the paradox of counterpoint. I was doomed to shatter images into
variations of gusts of sounds and gleams. This is h o w "The G o b let of Blizzards" was built. It demonstrated once and for all the
impossibility of a "symphony" in words. 8 8
This statement itself is not completely clear. Nevertheless, Bely s essential point seems to be that he failed to create symbols because he failed
to merge adequately internal experiences ("the hallucinations of a consciousness") with images taken from the world of nature (the "material
world"). Images that were supposed to e m b o d y inner experiences were
thus "shattered." Perhaps a clearer w a y to have put it was that he tried
58
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
59
lengthen the Symphony exclusively for structural reasons, and explains that he was really more of an investigator of artistic form than
an artist (p. 2). He also acknowledges that what he produced may not
give him any right to the reader's attention (p. 3).
Bely's sense of discomfort with his finished product is a reflection of
his high degree of (not always accurate) self-consciousness about it. He
was aware, in other words, that he had moved beyond his earlier Symphonies, which, despite their generic novelty, remain largely intelligible
works of lyrical and narrative prose.
-2-
60
Andrei Bely
French and Belgian Symbolists. Similarly, the twentieth-century "lyrical novelists" not only reacted against the prevailing positivism of their
day, but also inherited their roles as heirs of the romantic exiles. 91 As
Bely attests in his memoirs and theoretical writings, and as his works
prove, his symbolism also grew from a personal rebellion against the
outmoded artistic fashions that were attached to a positivistic world
view, as well as the variously renovated Romantic currents that had
reached Russia in the mid-1890s. 92 And like the Romantics, he was also
influenced directly by German Idealist philosophy through his study of
Kant and those who built on him, such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
and the neo-Kantians Rickert and Cohen, as well as indirectly through
Vladimir Soloviev, who built on Schelling.
-3The Fourth Symphony is basically a love story, though the love intrigue is almost totally obscured by the masses of imagery that sprout
from it. One Adam Petrovich, a mystic, encounters Svetlova, a beautiful society woman with "fiery hair" (one of the signs that she is to be
seen as the apocalyptic woman clothed with the sun) and falls in love
with her. She is also attracted to him, but must put up with an odious
husband, who, moreover, because of financial difficulties, surrenders
her to a certain Colonel Svetozarov. Both Adam Petrovich and Svetlova struggle against their carnal desires, and decide to spend some
time in monasteries in the north to dedicate themselves to sacred love.
Upon their return, however, their frequent meetings result in a rekindling of passion and a near consummation in a highly effective scene
that is easily the most erotic in all of Bely's works, and one of the most
unbuttoned in all of serious Russian literature. In the end Svetlova does
not submit, but her husband discovers them together. She returns to
the nunnery, and Adam Petrovich, after being seriously wounded in a
duel with her husband, is taken to a monastery as well. He lingers in a
semiconscious state for two years. Then he and Svetlova rediscover
each other; now, however, their love is purely sacred. After she slays
the apocalyptic dragon, the lovers are reunited in a blizzard and, apparently, ascend to heaven. 93
Even a bare outline of the plot suggests clearly that Bely was concerned with dramatizing individual instances of mystical self-transcendence that are reenactments of a great cosmic process. Kovac makes a
good case for the Fourth Symphony being a restatement, in artistic
form, of Soloviev's conception of man's difficult ascent to "Godmanhood." For Soloviev, achieving this state of union with the Divine
meant having to overcome man's earthly, temporal nature by means of
love between men and women. The human emotion of love is of divine
The Symphonies
61
origin, but in its earthly form it can easily be perverted. However, human beings can also realize it in its pure form. To accomplish this, they
must overcome egotism, not through self-effacement, but "by realizing
the majesty of one's own individuality" in a total union with the beloved. Such a union in Soloviev s view is a microcosm of the macrocosmic and apocalyptic union of mankind with God. 9 4
In a most interesting way, the Fourth Symphony thus turns out to be
a positive treatment of what Bely satirized in the Second. Musatov and
the "fairytale" were attracted to each other, but she in a purely flirtatious manner, while he saw her as the woman clothed with the sun. Unsullied references to the apocalypse were reserved for the "resurrected"
Vladimir Soloviev and his companion, while Musatov's apocalyptic
plans collapsed into farce, but Adam Petrovich and Svetlova experience a personal apocalypse that is nowhere undermined by the narrator.
Moreover, although the differences between the works are enormous, several of the major themes of the First Symphony reappear in
the Fourth. There too a male and a female character experience a mystical attraction to each other that culminates in their attaining a heavenly
realm after the Knight overcomes a base and malevolent heritage. And
although an important female figure is absent from the Third Symphony, Khandrikov also enacts what his fellow protagonists in the other
Symphonies either attempt or achievehe steps across the seeming gap
between the terrestrial realm and the transcendent.
As the Third Symphony showed especially clearly, a particular conception of time was also an essential part of man's link to the transcendent.
Time as such was of course already important in the Second Symphony's apocalypticism, but it is only in the Third that Bely's conception of
time as a spiral took obvious form. And although less clearly than in
the Third, a similar view of time appears in the Fourth Symphony.
The rectilinear component of the temporal spiral is suggested by the
proto-apocalyptic ending of the Symphony, in which Svetlova as the
woman clothed with the sun slays the dragon. Since this event precedes
the Second Coming, it can be thought of as the penultimate point on
the temporal line that began (implicitly) with Genesis. But in addition,
at the end of part four, Adam Petrovich and Svetlova ascend, as the
narrator puts it, "through time . . . to their homeland" (p. 227). T h e
fact that they return whence their souls came, as well as move through
time, suggests they move along a whorl of a spiral. This is the idea that
emerges from the narrator's statements:
All that was has not died: all that was, splashes on the surface.
Just a little longer.
62
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
63
agery in this work is apparent from the very beginning. The first cluster
of verses reads:
The blizzard blew pale gusts off the roofs.
Snows spurted upward, and, like lilies, swayed over the city.
Melodious ribbons of silver swooped down, flew by, enveloped.
Collided, shattering into snow.
And the snow scattered into handfuls of diamonds. Spurting
like hundreds of midges, dancing, it flew about, and lay down at
one's feet.
And the midges were extinguished.
But, spurting light, they arose again.
Again gigantic lilies, having flown up, and swaying above the
city, fell with the snow storm.
This was the first blizzard of winter, (p. 7)
The scene is oriented primarily toward rhythmic and visual perceptions, and by means of vocabulary, syntax, and length of phrases renders well the erratic movement and pause of a snow storm, pure and
simple.
However, according to Bely's theoretical writings, as well as his prefatory remarks to the Symphony, the image of the snow storm is also
supposed to be an expression of inner experiences with roots in the
transcendent (presumably, in this case, the imagery belongs to a firstperson "lyrical" perception). This is precisely the dimension of the
Fourth Symphony's symbolic imagery that is difficult to apprehend:
the reader can "see" Bely's symbols, but is often entirely uncertain what
they signify. To be sure, the snow storm is presented as beautiful, and
the lily has well-known religious and artistic associations with purity,
the Virgin, and resurrection. These inevitably provide a direction for
expectations from the rest of the text, which, however, are never fulfilled.
The snow storm's meanings also increase in range during the course
of the Symphony. A number of anthropomorphic shapes appear to be
generated out of the flying snow, such as "a white corpse" (p. 8), "an invisible deacon" (p. 10), "a rider" and "his horse" (p. 18), "an icy skeleton" (p. 31). They inevitably add to the generally supernatural atmosphere of the storm, but their denotative function is weak. The
narrator speaks of the "blizzard bridegroom" who, in turn, sings: "You,
blizzard,wine creator: transform the vinegar of suffering into silver
and snow storm" (p. 39). The narrator also personally addresses an ektenia (a part of the Russian Orthodox liturgy consisting of versicles and
responses) 96 to the blizzard three times, in which he repeats "Let us pray
to the blizzard" as if it were identical with God (pp. 41, 59, 215).
64
Andrei Bely
But the opposite of this sacral significance is also found in the blizzard. In its "voice" Svetlova hears a "moaning cry about lustful nights,
about dead embraces, about a body being surrendered again and again
the moaning cry flooded her soul with anguish" (p. 143). This is a reminder of her husband's repulsive demands, representing the negative
side of the Solovievian conception of human love. (The link between
passion and a snow storm had been canonized earlier by Tolstoy in
Anna Karenina, and Bely's treatment of it in the Symphony is paralleled by Blok's in the collection Snow Mask, 1907.)
It is of course expected that a symbol as widespread in the Symphony
as the blizzard should have a range and depth of meaning that cannot
be easily exhausted. It is also expected that the reader should have to
work at making sense of the text before him. Bely obviously understood this, and, moreover, placed as a cornerstone of his theory of
symbolism the belief that art's role is to transform man:
An artistic image [a symbol] is like a mountain, the slopes of
which are covered by a vineyard of ideas; here at the slope is
where the new wine is madethe wine of a new life; but ideas are
not given here as wine: one cannot get them directly out of the
image; the effort of transformation, of understanding, of divining is necessary on the part of those who perceive art. 9 7
The process of fathoming symbols thus transforms the reader or perceiver, and acts as a potential bridge between the "fictional" world of
the text and the reader's real world. In these terms, the problem with
the Fourth Symphony is one of degree: the range and depth of symbols'
meanings is too broad. And the amount of purely mechanical unraveling of imagery that is necessary to get even a vague emotional or ideational impact from it undercuts its effectiveness.
A striking, extreme example of the disjunction between image and
meaning in the Symphony occurs in an (imaginary?) monologue that
Adam Petrovich addresses to Svetlova. His statements are in quotation
marks, followed immediately by short, purely descriptive passages
about a swan that are enclosed in parentheses: '"Holy ecstasies are
open to us, eternal, bright ecstasies, because every love carries one to
Christ as on wings.' (They were sitting on a swan's back and watching
how the swan carries [them?] off)." The swan, in addition to its obvious
extrinsic associations (it is a conventional image in French Symbolism
associated with purity and coldness, and appears in Tiutchev, a poet
important for the "second generation" of Russian Symbolists), is also
specifically attached to the image of Svetlova in the Symphony. But although the swan image is juxtaposed with the "inner experiences" of
Adam Petrovich, it does not fuse with them to form a symbol.
The Symphonies
65
This example also illustrates the problem with point of view in the
Fourth Symphony. On occasion it is impossible to determine if certain
imagery is related to the narrator's or the characters' internal experiences, or to both at once. This is not simply a matter of Bely's having
developed free indirect discourse to an extreme in this work. Since the
characters exist in a world in which metaphysical good and evil are opposed, it is important to be able to tell if they have the narrator's or implied author's support or not. It is uncertain if Bely's inability to distinguish at times characters' perceptions from the consciousness of the
narrator, and from the implied author, is a consequence on his conception of symbolism, as it was in Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coups, for
example, or an artistic lapse. Since in all his works preceding the Fourth
Symphony, as in all his works following it, Bely shifts between distinctly first and third-person passages, and allows the narrator's voice to
blend with that of characters only in clearly delineated instances, the
ambiguous passages in the Fourth Symphony may not have been what
he sought to create.
It should also be noted that Bely occasionally reverts to the facile
suggestiveness that typified his First Symphony (and can be found in all
the others to a lesser degree). An egregious instance is the narrator's
mention of a Gnostic "call": "someone was summoning someone somewhere" (pp. 32, 34, 149). 9 8 Bely also enjoys repeating the adjective
"strange" without any additional qualifiers in an attempt to heighten
mystery (pp. 38, 82).
Bely himself may have sensed that his highly elliptical form of communication was not always accessible to the reader. In a number of instances in the Symphony, he resolves long series of obscure images by
suddenly having the narrator identify what they seem to be about.
These statements never exhaust all of the symbolic implications of the
images, of course, but the very fact that the narrator clues the reader in
is an implicit betrayal of Bely's symbolic method. A good example is
the beginning section of part two:
Oh, water,the roar of foam, oh, silver lace!
Above the pool, like a transparent bird, you spurted during the
summer.
Spurted during the summer: became a crystal shield. Became
exhausted, falling like crackling crystal.
Ah, crystals!
Ring out, ring out, golden crystals!
Louder ring out, laugh louder, ring out louderfall like a fountain, fall!
And with splashes of laughter bemoan enthusiastically [oplakivaite vostorzhenno]\
(p. 63)
66
Andrei Bely
The Symphonies
67
The novel The Silver Dove (written and published in 1909) 1 is, at first
glance, the most conventional of Bely's prose fictions. It has neither the
original typographical form and extreme stylistic experiments of the
Symphonies, nor the radical displacement of the conventions of the realistic novel and the "ornamental prose" style of Petersburg and later
works. Bely appears to have stepped back from the experiments with
genre he had begun to pursue at the beginning of his literary career,
turning to a more traditional and tested form. 2 As a result, the characters and their story produce a much more conventional and clear impression, as do the setting and narrative form.
Nevertheless, The Silver Dove remains a strikingly original work.
There is nothing at all conventional about its preoccupation with symbolic cognition, which, in abstract terms, is the heart of the novel, and
ultimately the reason for its orientation toward vivid visual imagery. In
1909, apart from Bely's own Symphonies, the only work with which
The Silver Dove could be compared in the uniqueness of the world contained within it and the novelty of its concerns is Fedor Sologub's The
Petty Demon. These two novels represent the highest achievements of
Russian Symbolist prose fictionindeed, of early Russian Modernist
prosebefore Bely's masterpiece, Petersburg.
The Silver Dove tells the story of Petr Darialsky, a young classical
philologist and minor decadent poet, who travels to the village of Tselebeevo during the summer of 1905. Distant rumblings of the Revolution can be heard in the background. The reason for Petr's journey is
spiritual: he believes the Russian peasants possess a traditional esoteric
wisdom that the Westernized elements of Russian society and the West
69
itself have lost. In Tselebeevo, Petr woos and wins Katiathe naive
granddaughter of the old, Westernized Baroness Todrabe Graaben,
who lives nearby on her estate Gugolevo. However, the village and its
environs also happen to be the home of a secret, heretical and mystical
sect of peasants and townsfolk known as the Doves. The head of the
sect, Kudeiarov, notices Petr and his spiritual proclivities and decides
to lure him into the sect by means of the coarse peasant wench Matrena. Kudeiarov's plan is to have Petr engender a Dove Child in Matrenaa child that will become nothing less than the savior of the
world. Petr succumbs to Matrena, abandons Katia, and comes to live
and work with Kudeiarov and Matrena. Despite Kudeiarov's strong
occult powers, which he manifests during rituals in which Darialsky
participates, Petr's attachment to the Doves wavers. He is unable to
shake off the (correct) impression that the Doves are associated with
metaphysical evil rather than good. Kudeiarov is displeased with Petr
because no Dove child is forthcoming. After some vacillation, Petr decides to escape from the Doves and return to Moscow. But before he
can, Kudeiarov, fearing betrayal, has Petr killed in the neighboring
town of Likhov.
-2-
70
Andrei Bely
The Silver
Dove
71
difference between the two conceptions of symbolism. In the Symphonies Bely's tendency was clearly to make man's thoughts and actions dependent on an otherworldly realm. In The Silver Dove, however, Bely
does not appear to have resolved the question of free will. This may explain why both conceptions of symbolism can be found in the work.
Some of the narrator's symbolic perceptions in The Silver Dove are
repeated frequently and thus function as leitmotifs, a device that is
clearly a legacy from the Symphonies. Moreover, since the leitmotifs in
The Silver Dove consist of the narrator's perceptions, Bely's use of the
device reflects the first-person bent implied in his theoretical essays and
manifested to varying degrees in all of his other works of fiction.
One literally haunting example is the eerie bush near Tselebeevo,
which, from a distance, looks to the narrator like a lonely wanderer approaching the village: "years passed, and the wanderer kept walking on
and on; he couldn't reach the human dwellings, and kept threatening
the village from afar" (I, 47: 36). The image reappears a number of
times (I, 63: 48; I, 123: 95; I, 275, 276: 210, 211; II, 21: 244; II, 164:
354), and then undergoes a series of transformations that connect it
with a malevolent character in the novel and make it into a specific
threat against Darialsky rather than a general one against the village.
First, during a description of a thunderstorm, the narrator mentions a
bizarre being he calls a "bristling creature" (raskariaka),
which approaches stealthily at night and "will pinch and strangle you with its
withered arms [u sukhorukikh
rukakh]" (I, 234: 180); in the morning
you will be found hanging from a bush. Furthermore, the Russian
words for "withered arm" are echoed in the name of the tinsmith Sukhorukov, a leading Dove who formulates the plan to murder Darialsky
and later helps to strangle him. This is not to suggest that Sukhorukov
is the bush literally come to life, but there is strong evidence for linking
Sukhorukov to demonic evil. Equally important is that in the end of the
novel, the bush turns into nothing less than evil incarnate. First the
bush becomes someone pursuing Darialsky from Tselebeevo to Likhov,
the town where he is murdered (II, 214: 393); then it is someone following Darialsky through Likhov (II, 221, 225; 399, 403). Finally, the narrator says that the figure following Petr is the devil (II, 228: 405). It is as
if the evil dormant in the bush and manifest in Sukhorukov had finally
succeeded in reaching its victim by the end of the work.
The narrator records dozens of other comparable symbolic perceptions, which also recur and become leitmotifs. Echoing the "blue abyss
of day," he also sees the "red abyss of the sunset" (II, 143: 340); a hut
whose window casts a sidelong glance like a clear, and then an evil eye
(I, 10: 6); the heat of the day that becomes suffocating and evil (I, 54:
72
Andrei Bely
41); a hawk's beak on the dove that is embroidered on a ritual cloth (I,
102: 78); and, if you look closely, as he puts it, the gnawed sheep bone
that shows through in Kudeiarov's face (I, 83: 64). All of the narrator's
symbolic perceptionsdirected at a wide range of phenomenapoint
in the same direction: toward a malevolent supernatural presence that
is immanent in the world of the novel.
This characteristic feature of The Silver Dove represents a significant
change from Bely's attempt to create symbols in the Symphonies. He
has clearly avoided the problem of imbalances between imagery and
meaning that characterizes the First and Fourth Symphonies. Bely's imagery is now lush in its specificity and ripe with hints of higher meaning
at the same time. He has also avoided the division between descriptions
of otherworldly and terrestrial realms that one finds in the Third Symphony, and the disharmony between different underlying metaphysical
systems that typified the Second.
By 1909 Bely had become a more experienced writer, but part of his
success with the symbolic perceptions in The Silver Dove may also be
due to his using his own experience. We know from his memoirs that he
actually trained himself to see "Platonic Ideas" in nature, and had many
periods in his life when he was subject to "mediumistic phenomena." 3 In
Notes of an Eccentric, for example, Bely recalls an "ancient network of
ravines" in the Russian province of Tula where he spent summers from
1899 to 1906 that was "gnawing away the fertile earth, and crawling
menacingly toward us." He perceived this as a Solovievian threat from
the East, and fought against it by throwing stones into the ravines. 4
Similarly, in his memoir about Blok, he recollects that he once saw how
"a completely black sky divided the blue sky, and glanced at the meadow out of the blue sky" (a variant of this image also appears in the early
essay "Sacred Colors," 1903). He admits that he used this moment in
The Silver Dove, and that Blok had praised it in the novel. Bely also
preserved the significance this moment had for him in real life: in both
the novel and the memoir, the perception is an adumbration of the danger that lies ahead for those who have set out on the wrong spiritual
path (Blok, and Bely himself at the time, as well as Darialsky)specifically, that of confusing evil for good.
Not all of Bely's autobiographical symbolic perceptions were visual,
and they certainly did not stop with the appearance of The
Silver
Dove. While in the countryside during the summer of 1911, as he also
reports in his memoir about Blok, he and his companions heard hollow
rumblings of thunder. But it could not have been thunder, Bely remembers realizing at the time, for the sky was clear; neither could it have
been artillery; nor was there any traffic on the road. Bely's conclusion
was that the "thundering silence" he heard then was a thundering "not
The Silver
Dove
73
74
Andrei Bely
In the Second Symphony, Musatov's "fatal flaw," which led to his becoming the butt of a cosmic joke by confusing a society woman for Divine Wisdom, had been the willfulness of his excessive desire to see the
woman clothed with the sun. A comparable connection between will
and grievous error characterizes Kudeiarov's theurgy in The Silver
Dove. As in the Second Symphony, the narrator in this novel makes
symbolic perceptions. However, the narrator also moves easily into the
eyes and minds of the characters. There is therefore more of an interpenetration of the narrator's and characters' perspectives in the novel
than in the Symphony. The contrasts between the narrator's and the
characters' symbolic perceptions of comparable or identical events are
thus more subtle in The Silver Dove than they were in the earlier work.
All the characters achieve intermittent glimpses into supernatural
realms, but not all their perceptions prove to be equally deep or valid.
And it quickly becomes obvious that the perceptions by characters
who are under Kudeiarov's influence are distinguishedin the worst
instancesby a proto-apocalyptic confusion of evil with good.
A small but revealing instance of the narrator simply seeing more accurately and more deeply than a character occurs during Kudeiarov's
journey through the countryside on his way to a Dove ceremony in
Likhov. The narrator catches a glimpse of the dynamic life that fills the
world: "the bushes sobbed and danced; the tiresome stalks danced too;
the rye danced; and the spry, light ripples squirmed fussily over the surface of the cold, calm, brown puddles." Then the narrator wonders
whether or not Kudeiarov sees what is going on around him, and answers his own question as follows: "All around him were foulness and
mud: the rain danced, bubbles burst on the puddles; but it was all right,
the carpenter kept on wading through the mud" (I, 74: 57). This description, with its emphasis on lowly mud rather than on the glimmering sentience that fills the world, suggests that Kudeiarov does not see
as much as the narrator. The importance of this detail is that it puts into
question Kudeiarov's vatic nature, which obviously occupies a central
place in the novel, and undercuts his entire occult program, the true nature of which also emerges through dramatized moments of visual cognition.
Both willfulness and evil mimicking good are central to a brilliant sequence of passages about Fekla Matveevna Eropegina s visit to Tselebeevo. She is one of the most pious of the Doves, and approaches with
a breathless, mystical expectancy the town where Kudeiarov lives, for,
as she believes, it is the place of the Holy Spirit's incarnation. The
world through which she passes is multifariously alive. When she
crosses a stream, the narrator comments, in a richly onomatopoetic
style that is laden with charming emotional accents: vozmutilsia ru-
75
76
Andrei Bely
ble; in the thin whistling of the branches could be heard: 'So it must
be'." Her new misperceptions continue even when she arrives at home
and smiles joyously at her stricken husband while, the narrator notes, a
dove flutters in her soul (II, 59, 62: 273, 276).
This is also a clear instance of the truly evil being hidden under a veil
of seeming good that recalls the small-scale dualistic perceptions of the
narrator discussed above, but with the difference that the character is
deceived about the true nature of things whereas the narrator was not.
The devils Eropegina had seen as she arrived in Tselebeevo were most
likely there because of Kudeiarov's theurgy rather than in opposition to
it. Moreover, as will become apparent later, Kudeiarov's evil derives
from some source beyond him. But typically for Bely, neither the carpenter nor Eropegina is aware of being a victim of coercion.
Kudeiarov's willfulness (assuming it is his own, and does not derive
from outside him) is stressed in other ways. He is the one who wants to
use Matrena and Darialsky to create a fleshly trap for God in order to
hasten the millennium. Similarly, he objects to Abram the Wanderer's
paean to the joys of a rustic, peripatetic life in harmony with an unfettered spirit (an attitude the narrator shares: "if everyone roamed about,
they would inhale the same spirit and become one soul: the one spirit
has clothed the earth with its raiment"; I, 77: 59). Indeed, Kudeiarov
emphasizes his (excessive) concern with the "materialism" of his spiritual
program, which is in keeping with his trade as a carpenter, by adding:
"To build, brother, one has to planeto plane the House of God" (I, 81:
62).
Love between the sexes plays a crucial role in Soloviev's conception
of the world's salvation through Divine Wisdom; it is therefore especially noteworthy that Kudeiarov should try to influence the "affair"
between Matrena and Darialsky. Not only does he attempt to initiate it
by flooding Matrena with his occult powers so that she could attract
Darialsky (who is spiritually predisposed anyway), but Kudeiarov also
wants to force the romance to develop in a particular way. Matrena
herself senses difference when Kudeiarov's command becomes transformed into a "sweet and free uprush of the soul." And the carpenter is
enraged that she and Darialsky have been meeting "without prayers,
sense or ceremony," meaning, without his control (I, 2 8 6 - 8 7 : 218-20).
Although this might not seem an unreasonable objection within the
praxis of theurgic rites, what Kudeiarov yearns for, as the narrator explains, is "that the incarnation of the spirit in the flesh of man would
happen not as the world, but as he, the carpenter, wants it [italics
mine]" (I, 114: 87). This suggests that Kudeiarov himself is at least partially conscious that he is going against a divine or universal grain.
The Silver
Dove
77
-4One of the seductive features of The Silver Dove is that the reader is
allowed to participate in Darialsky's growing awareness of a metaphysical evil gradually manifesting itself in Kudeiarov's entourage.
Darialsky's ghastly fate is of course foreshadowed clearly and often
from the beginning of the novel, as is the fact that a potent malevolence
is loose in the world. But this is seen on the narrator's superior level,
whereas the characters' experiences occur on the level of the plot. Thus,
the first ritual of the Doves that we see in Eropegina's bath-house contains only a hint that something may be awry with the sect, whereas the
final rite in Kudeiarov's house, with Darialsky participating, is quite
another matter. Moreover, what happens there is presented through
Darialsky's eyes, so the reader has the impression of participating in his
uneasy discoveries.
The incarnation Kudeiarov had hoped for does not occur. As he tells
Sukhorukov with surprising casualness, a "corporeal child" did form,
but it was not "solid" and "dissipated into steam" without lasting more
than an hour. All of this was caused by Darialsky's weakness and fears,
Kudeiarov explains (II, 162: 353).
But although this incarnation failed to take place, Darialsky, apparently alone among all the participants in the rituals, notices that another presence does begin to manifest itself. In one scene Kudeiarov,
Matrena, Darialsky, and a laborer are dancing, and the narrator confirms Darialsky's fears: "they dance, all four of them, but it's as if they
are five . . . Who is the fifth?" (II, 151: 346). Ironically, Kudeiarov had
earlier forbidden dancing during the Doves' rites, because, as he explained, it would be dangerous. Perhaps the change in his attitude is a
reflection of his theurgy having been usurped by evil. At any rate, after
the ecstatic moments pass, Petr continues to feel very uneasy:
everything that had happened to him on the day before now appeared to him disgusting, shameful, and frightening: fearfully, in
full daylight, he would suddenly turn around at bushes, empty
corners, and it kept seeming to him that a certain someone was
following in his footsteps; he felt someone's stifling invisible hand
on his chest; and he feared suffocation. (II, 180: 367)
The victim to be has clearly experienced a premonition of his own
death in this passage. Several pages later, Bely dramatizes very effectively how Darialsky comes extremely close to actually catching a
glimpse of the invisible, evil presence itself. This time he is apparently
alone with Kudeiarov and Matrena:
78
Andrei Bely
the three of them are planing wood; but no: you lower your eyes
and there seem to be four: who is the fourth? You raise your
eyesthree again; lower them once more, and it still seems as if
the carpenter had begun to whisper with that fourth one; and that
fourth points a finger at Petr and chuckles, eggs the carpenter on
against Petr. (II, 186: 371-372)
The seventh chapter, in which this scene occurs, is subtitled "The
Fourth One," which underscores this figure's importance. But the closest we get to actually seeing the devil in any form is in another scene,
when Darialsky almost recognizes that the unremarkable tinsmith Sukhorukov is apparently the "fourth" who had "flickered" before his gaze
(in a manner anticipating how the inhabitants of the city can become
"shadows" in Petersburg). However, Darialsky stops short and concludes that the tinsmith could not be the fourth because "he is a nothinga zero" (II, 188: 373). Darialsky s words contain irony at his own
expense, of course, for the idea of Evil as total absence goes back at
least as far as St. Augustine. 7
This final characterization is particularly important because it echoes Sukhorukov's own deeply blasphemous and anarchical comments
to Kudeiarov, which consolidate the impression that he is in fact demonic. Sukhorukov implicitly denigrates the idea of a church, the existence of sin, and most significantly, of a Divinity judging in heaven:
"there's only emptiness; either chicken meat, or man's substanceit's
all one incontradictable [neprekoslovnyi] flesh," he proclaims (II, 189:
374). His remarks deny that there is any transcendent order, and are actually directed as much against Kudeiarov's heretical sect as against
any other metaphysical beliefs. Moreover, Sukhorukov's reference to
himself as the smartest person he knows is additional evidence for seeing him as a minion of Lucifer. It hardly bears repeating that Kudeiarov's distinguishing characteristic was also pride.
Sukhorukov's diabolical attempt to undermine Kudeiarov's faith
sounds like the remarks of the weird, demonic beings Sergei Musatov
encounters in the Second Symphony after his eschatological hopes
have been dashed. These creatures also deny the existence of a transcendent. Moreover, their evil nature was identified both by the narrator and the Symphony's positive character, the quiet old priest. This is
close to what happens in The Silver Dove. The old occultist Schmidt,
who represents the positive mystical pole in the novel and articulates
accurate, deeply perceptive views, recognizes that Darialsky is indeed
beset by demons (I, 298: 228). Moreover, the narrator crowns the sequence of symbolic perceptions that began with the bush threatening
Tselebeevo with the remark, near the novel's end, that Darialsky was
79
being followed by the devil in Likhov. The reemergence of this interrelated set of themes after the seven-year hiatus separating the Second
Symphony from The Silver Dove suggests the continuity of Bely's
thought on the nature of evil and its relation to human pride, as well as
the central importance these questions had for him in his world view.
One of the greater ironies in The Silver Dove is that Kudeiarov's attempt to coerce the birth of a savior for mankind becomes a vehicle for
the appearance of an evil that hides behind a veil of good. Kudeiarov
thus becomes a party to one of the great acts of dissimulation in Christian eschatology, or, perhaps better to say, to an event that adumbrates
the appearance of the Antichrist.
The version of the apocalypse that dominated Bely's imagination
was Vladimir Soloviev's Brief Tale about the Antichrist, which, although based in Biblical Revelation, contains his own additions.8 Chief
among these is the idea of pan-Mongolism, and the vision of the Antichrist as a purveyor of "falsified good"an impostor who seems to be a
benefactor of humanity while he is actually in league with Satan. This
aspect of Soloviev's prophecy has been the subject of debate, with some
claiming that it has no basis in Christian Scriptural traditions. 9 But be
that as it may, it is a vision of evil that was Bely's model in The Silver
Dove.
Not only is evil's masquerade as good the central event around which
the novel's action is organized; it is also behind the narrator's and some
of the characters' dualistic perceptions. During the course of the novel,
the malevolent force that seems omnipresent below the surface of phenomena to the narrator's exclusively percipient gaze gradually intensifies and becomes reified into the invisible "fourth" or "fifth," and finally
overlaps with the clearly visible Sukhorukov. There is a difference, of
course, between evil mimicking good in order to deceive a perceiver,
and a perceiver glimpsing a spiritual evil behind material phenomena.
In the latter case, the evil does not manifest itself through intentional
deception. Nevertheless, because Bely has his narrator glimpse threats
in otherwise cheerful, or even merely neutral phenomena, such as the
blue sky, the shock of recognizing the evil behind them is comparable
to that of seeing through a veil of dissimulation. The narrator's individual perceptions scattered throughout the novel thus emerge as smallscale versions of the apocalyptic confusion of good and evil underlying
the work as a whole.
-5-
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Andrei Bely
motivation for going into the countryside are presented with a high degree of approval. This is the case despite the fact that Darialsky himself
is shown to have erred in trying to bring his beliefs to life.
Despite his errors and blindness, Petr is the hero in the novel, and his
spiritual lan is appealing. Schmidt makes this clear when he tells Katia
that only great and powerful souls are subject to the temptations that
Petr had experienced, and that only giants fall the way he did (I, 299:
228). Schmidt's appreciation is based on Darialsky's central, problematic desire "to personally create life." Without any other evaluation of
Petr, it might be tempting to regard Schmidt's views with some skepticism. However, the fact that the narrator lends his voice in support of
Darialsky's ideas, despite his criticism of the man's personal behavior
(1,175:133-134), suggests that these ideas should be taken seriously.
One day, while fishing in Tselebeevo, Petr experiences a moment of
mystical exultation and an upwelling of long-cherished thoughts. The
narrator, entering Petr s consciousness, merges with it in contemplation
of the mysteries of Russia's fields and people. The Russian peasant possesses a silent wisdom, the narrator explains, and knows simple words
that affect one strongly only if they remain unspoken: "come to them
and you will learn to be silent" (II, 93: 301). The West is markedly different: "a great multitude of words, sounds, signs the West had thrown
out to the world's amazement; but those words, those sounds, those
signslike werewolves, when dying out, lure men after thembut
where?" (II, 94: 302). By contrast, the Russian "taciturn word, issuing
from you, remains with you: and that word is a prayer."
In these somewhat ambiguous statements Bely is imputing deep
spirituality to Russia, and materialism and superficiality to Europe. He
is also expressing the widespread Romantic and Symbolist doctrine
that a complex spiritual life cannot ultimately be expressed in words,
thus echoing Tiutchev's famous line in his poem "Silentium" (1833): "An
uttered thought is a lie" (Mysl izrechennaia est' lozh').10
Having identified Russia's essential difference from the West, the narrator wonders how the two will come into contact:
there are many books in the West; there are many unuttered
words in Russia. Russia is that against which a book is shattered,
learning is scattered, and life itself is burnt; on that day when the
West is grafted onto Russia, a world-wide conflagration will engulf it; everything that can be consumed will burn, because only
out of the ashes of death can issue forth the paradisiacal soulthe
Fire-Bird. (II, 95-96: 303)
This passage is important for understanding The Silver Dove because it
provides the positive counterpoint to the Doves' perverted theurgical
81
plans. The narrator foretells that a synthesis will replace the existing dichotomy between Russia and the West, and embodies this synthesis in
the optimistic though ultimately apocalyptic image of resurrection out
of conflagration.
There is, however, some ambiguity in Bely's language in this important passage. The narrator says that when the West is grafted onto Russia, a "world-wide" conflagration will engulf "the West." Presumably, a
truly world-wide event will affect the entire globe.
The idea of a synthesis between Russia and the West is also an integral part of Darialsky s views on the Russian peasants and his own relation to them. He makes an unusual identification between what he sees
as the pastoral existence of the peasantry and the fountainhead of
Western civilization:
an eternal heaviness filled his soul, and, for that reason, the sunny life of long-past years in blessed Greece with wars, games,
sparkling thoughts, and always dangerous love, like the life of
the simple Russian people, always called up to the surface of his
soul pictures of a blessed paradisiacal life, of shady huts and honeyed lightly blown meadows with games and choral dances.
he dreamt that in the depth of his native people there pulsed an
older antiquity that was native to the people and had not yet been
outlivedancient Greece. In Orthodoxy and precisely in the outmoded concepts of the Orthodox peasant (i.e. in his opinion, a
paganizer) he saw the new torch of the Greek coming into the
World. (I, 172, 1 7 4 - 7 5 : 132, 133)
As Bely reveals in his memoirs, these were actually the ideas of his close
friend Sergei Soloviev, the philosopher's nephew. 11 The appeal of the
two societies is their fundamentally holistic character (which is also
probably the reason why the poet and scholar Viacheslav Ivanov,
among other major figures of Russian Symbolism, repeatedly returned
to Ancient Greece in his works). In this the two societies bear an abstract, formal similarity to symbolic perception, whose purpose is the
creation of links between different levels of being through cognitive
acts. The parallels Darialsky sees between ancient Greece and the Russian peasantrya view from which the narrator distances himself,
howevercan be related therefore to the complex synthesis of Russia
and the West to which the narrator does lend his voice.
The role that Petr sees for himself in this schema is that of a sort of
Nietzschean overman. Going on within him is "a struggle between the
image of the ancient beast and a new, similarly beast-like, already human health" (I, 176: 134). In the struggle for the new life, he feels that
"everything is permitted to him . . . there is nothing above him, no
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Andrei Bely
their [i. e. Petr's contemporaries'] entire decrepit heritage had already become decomposed in him; but the vileness of this decomposition had not yet burned [italics mine] into good earth: for
that reason, the weak seeds of the future were somehow sluggishly vegetating in him. (1,176:134)
The effete inheritance mentioned in this passage is presumably the
avant-garde, "decadent" culture of the West that Darialsky's contemporaries (and he too, at one point) embraced, and that is parodied several times in the novel. And the peregar (transformation through fire)
that has not yet been completed in Petra personal apocalypseresembles the one the entire world is to undergo. Petr's problem, as the
narrator suggests paradoxically, in view of the novel's implicit condemnation of individual freedom, is that in some important ways he was
too weak to complete the existential struggle that he began. This is the
reason why Petr was so strongly drawn to the land and the people's
prayers about the land: he sought among them the strength he lacked
himself (1,176:134).
But this is where Petr's fate, together with his weakness and error,
conspire to doom him. Because of his blindness, which he overcomes
only by the end of the novel, when it is too late, Petr does not recognize
that "the people" to whom he was drawn are not their own masters. As
the narrator explains, echoing Schmidt, an "evil eye" that hates Russia,
a "secret enemy," has penetrated into the heart of the Russian people
and usurped their identity. These are the Doves with Kudeiarov and his
machinations at their center.
Thus, Darialsky's catastrophic mistake is to confuse the Doves with
the true Russian folka cognitive error based in misperception. Petr
seems to realize this himself at one point during a ceremony when he
looks at Matrena and Kudeiarov and sees that the Doves are not the
Russia he wanted to join: "horror, the noose, and the pit: not Russia,
but some dark abyss of the East presses upon Russia from these bodies
emaciated by zealous rites" (II, 147:342). Mention of the East is especially significant since it shows the Doves to be harbingers of the panMongolian invasion in Soloviev's eschatology, which, in turn, foreshadows the eventual (but temporary) triumph of the Antichrist.
83
In his preface to The Silver Dove, Bely referred to the work as the
first part of a trilogy to be entitled "East or West." If the Doves represent
the East, it seems reasonable to assume that Bely intended The Silver
Dove to be primarily a portrayal of a manifestation of the Solovievian
East. But the West is present in the novel as well, in an abstract form in
the narrator's remarks, and in the concrete in members of the Todrabe
Graaben family. Although Baron Todrabe Graaben attempts to persuade Petr to return to the West in several scenes that capture beautifully the ebb and flow of their conflicting attitudes, Petr does not heed
him, and in this clearly has the narrator's approval. Indeed, everything
the narrator says about the West, and all we see of the Todrabe Graabens (whose farcical name is composed of the German words for
"death," "raven," and "grave" or "ditch," and is an obvious indication of
their moribundity) shows that the West is no antidote to the East. Thus
the collective title "East or West" was somewhat misleading, since it
seemed to suggest that the only possible choice was one or the other.
"Neither East nor West" would have been a more accurate title for the
planned trilogy. Indeed, Bely maintains this doubly negative attitude in
Petersburg, where he shifts his focus to the hallucinatory, Westernized
capital of Russia. And from what little is known about it, the unwritten
third noveltentatively entitled "The Invisible City"would probably have dramatized the apocalyptic synthesis of East and West about
which the narrator of The Silver Dove speaks. 12
Before leaving Darialsky's and the narrator's ideas about the individual's role in the cosmic destiny of Russia, it is worth recalling that in the
Second Symphony one aspect of Musatov's theurgic plan was a desire
to unite the "skeletal remains" of European culture with "Eastern
blood." He thinks of this during his trip to the countrythe traditional
locus of uncontaminated, native beliefsand he is beginning "to guess
Russia's role" in this "great union." 13 In these ideas Musatov is clearly a
precursor of Darialsky's. Moreover, the two protagonists also resemble
each other in that each originally misperceived a thoroughly worldly
woman to be the mother of a world savior.
Bely's life between 1900 and 1909from the earliest Symphonies to
The Silver Dovewas filled with the most varied passions and involvements. To his early immersion in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and
Soloviev, he added during the decade's middle years a long, deep and
critical involvement with Kant; then, towards the decade's end, the
neo-Kantians (especially Heinrich Rickert), and the occult. Bely's early
exalted friendships and alliances with Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, the
Merezhkovskys and other "Petersburg Symbolists" could not survive
harrowing conflicts during the period 1905-1908 that involved personalities as much as ideologies, and that were played out on the pages of
84
Andrei Bely
Symbolist periodicals as much as in public halls, restaurants, and living rooms. It is therefore striking that Bely s thematic concerns should
remain so constant during the first decade of his creative life, even
while his development as an artist had progressed so far beyond his
first published Symphony.
-6-
All of Bely's theoretical writings ring with his conviction that symbolism is not merely an esthetic mode or literary movement, but an
epistemological stance that will completely transform man. The sense
of crisis to which Bely refers repeatedly in his essays and memoirsa
mood that lasted from the beginning to the end of his creative life
feeds on his typical syncretism: it encompassed everything from the development of modern thought out of Kant's critical philosophy, to an
anticipation of a literal Apocalypse, to the collapse of old Russia during the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions. All contemporary catastrophes
conspired in Bely's imagination to signal the imminent culmination of
man's break with his past and entry into a new, spiritual epoch.
In his fiction, the theme of the coming new man was sounded strongly
at the very start (in the Second Symphony, with Musatov's febrile anticipation of the Second Coming), and receives maximal clarity of expression in The Silver Dove in Darialsky's spiritual quest. This assertion must be qualified at once, however, because of the paradoxical
nature of Bely's conception of an individual's existential duties toward
his own self-transformation. In some essays, especially when he discusses Nietzsche and Ibsen, Bely makes it seem as if through sheer force
of will an individual can tear himself away from the beliefs and values
of the past and become a representative of the new mankind of the future. At the same time, in formulations about the ties between inner experiences and the transcendent, and even more strongly in the Symphonies themselves, he presents a thoroughly deterministic view of
existence, showing emotions, thoughts, and actions of individuals to
be the product of inscrutable supernatural forces. In later fictional and
theoretical works Bely resolves this paradox in the direction of a determinism that completely swallows the individual. But in The Silver
Dove the crucial question about the exact nature of man's tie to the
transcendent does not yet receive a clear resolution. Characters speak
of existential actions even though their lives belie any possibility for
real choices. And the fact that contradictory conceptions of symbolic
cognition seem to be at work in the novel should perhaps be understood as a sign of Bely's ambivalence about the reality of free will.
In The Silver Dove these questions revolve around the enigmatic
Schmidt, who occupies a privileged position in the novel. His prophetic
85
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Andrei Bely
timately derives from an evil source that uses the carpenter for its own
purpose (in an anticipation of a comparable hierarchy of coercion dramatized in Petersburg). Moreover, as Petr's initial reaction to her in the
beginning of the novel indicates, there was something already familiar
about her that made him respond to her: "what that face was communicating to him, what response it awakened in his soul, he did not know"
(I, 19: 13). A few pages later, the narrator makes clear that what Darialsky sensed in her went far beyond the material plane of being:
thus the maw of a thousand-year-old past, opening for an instant, resurrects the memory of what had never happened in your
life, awakens an unknown visage that is horribly familiar from
dreams; and the visage arises as an image of a nonexistent but still
existing childhood; so that's the sort of visage you have, pockmarked wench! (1,21:15)
In other words, the narrator, who shares Darialsky's perception of Matrena at this point, suggests that Darialsky had seen her during some
state of being like a previous incarnation, or in another, spiritual dimension. This undermines the likelihood that Darialsky actually had
very much choice in joining the Doves when Matrena was proferred as
bait. His attraction to her appears to have been literally fated.
In fact, we know that one night, when Petr was still a student, he
screamed and fainted after seeing something in a window whose curtains he remembered drawing, but which he suddenly noticed were
open. He recalled after he came to his senses that it had seemed as if a
woman had been standing outside the window, with a pock-marked,
eyebrowless face marked by the imprint of alluring sin (I, 132: 103).
These are clearly Matrena's distinguishing features.
There are also suggestions in the novel that the attraction Darialsky
feels for this negative female persona is an outgrowth of his longing for
something like Soloviev's Divine Wisdom. Thus, his involvement with
Matrenaan antithesis of the Divine Eternal Feminineemerges as another variant of the deceptive mimicry of good by evil that characterizes the Solovievian Antichrist, and that underlies the numerous dualistic perceptions made by the characters as well as the narrator.
Darialsky recalls that in his earliest childhood he had heard a sweet
but mocking song both at sunrise and during darkness. He waited and
called for long periods of time, but no one came (1,128-29:100). Petr's
description of this expectant state resembles closely Blok's poems to his
Beautiful Lady, which make comparable use of sunrises as symbols for
apocalyptic hope. Later, Darialsky realizes very clearly that although
his love for his fiance Katia may be quite real, she and the one whose
The Silver
Dove
87
summons he had heard are not the same person (a realization that also
came to Blok with a vengeance):
the memory awoke in him [emu vspomnilos'a
reflexive verb
form implying that the memory may have come from outside
him; a point to which I shall return] of that only one, whom he
had never met, and had not met in Katia. He loves Katia, but Katia is not that dawn: and it is not possible to meet that dawn in the
form of a woman. (I, 2 1 3 : 1 6 3 )
In Tselebeevo, the image of Katia and the memory of the summoning
dawn are both overwhelmed by Matrena in Petr's consciousness. But
when he decides to leave the Doves (if, in fact, it was his decision to do
so) he again senses a nearly palpable intimacy with his former feminine
ideal, as if her influence on his life were on the ascendant once again.
Bely renders Darialsky's renewed longing with exquisite delicacy, capturing through imagery and rhythm the ephemeral sensations and
states of mind that verge on being physical:
on his chest he felt the touch of invisible fingers, on his lipsthe
kisses of tenderly trembling lips; and still further he walked over
the empty field; the evening glow in yellowish pearls ran away
across the field; at times it began to seem to him that he was on
the verge of overtaking the evening glow.
he stretched out his hands to those dear hands: but a breeze whistled in his cold embraces; and the voice, familiar from time immemorial but long forgotten, now sounded again, scattering unanswered a quiet song without words. (II, 206: 387-388)
The image of Petr striding across empty fields into the fading sunset
is an excellent illustration of the unreflecting, helpless gravitation toward a potent force that typifies his entire existence, and that is shared
by many of Bely's protagonists. In his misperception of Matrena as the
Eternal Feminine, Darialsky reenacts Musatov s mistake in the Second
Symphony, even though the "fairytale" was not the unwitting agent of
metaphysical evil that Matrena is. Similarly, Musatov was inveigled
into making his mistake by a transcendent that "played a joke on him,"
and Darialsky has been lured from infancy by a "sweet but mocking
song."
Darialsky's experiences with an eternal feminine principle drawing
him nigh (to paraphrase the conclusion of Goethe's Faust), follow a spiral that recalls the movement of several protagonists' lives in the Sym-
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Andrei Bely
89
(II, 129: 329). Petr experiences this anomalous state at other times
(without, however, being fully conscious of what is happening to him),
and so do Matrena and Fekla Eropegina, the merchant's wife. Their
thoughts are induced by Kudeiarov, but we know that he in turn is only
a vehicle for evil's action in the world of man.
Bely goes so far as to suggest that thoughts actually reify into matter,
so that individuals become agents of transcendent forces that act
through them to create aspects of the material world. Petr experiences
this in the scene with General Chizhikov that takes place at Baroness
Todrabe Graaben's estate. He first feels, just for a moment, that the
chaos that had been raging in him recently has abated, and that "the demons have left his soul." Bely explains this brief period of quiescence by
saying that "a victory had occurred in him" over the destructive emotion that had been leading him off the correct path; his choice of words
emphasizes Darialsky's passivity. But the demons quickly begin
to swarm around him again, and assume absurd but entirely real
images: in truth, weren't this troika and the General himself born
of the misty filth that had fallen over the region: the troika had
simply settled out of the fog, and someone's vengeful hand had
thrown it into the estate.
As though answering his thought, someone's steps resounded
on the terrace.
(1,199:153)
These steps announce the appearance of the farcical Chukholka, another of Bely's highly comical personae. The narrator describes his various fashionable interests and pursuitswhich are all elements in Bely's
biting satire on his nemesis of the time, the "mystical anarchist" Georgy
Chulkovand adds the significant detail that he was "an
impotent
[italics mine] conduit for all sorts of astral impurities . . . Chukholka
passed through himself all kinds of filth, which then crawled out of him
onto anyone he talked to" (I, 204: 156).
In passages such as these, Bely approaches the more radical epistemological-ontological process that lies at the core of his view of the human condition in Petersburg.
In the second novel, the nature of the
connection between man and the transcendent hinges on individual intellects acting as channels for transcendent forces that take form as aspects of the phenomenal world under the guise of what the narrator
terms "self-thinking thoughts" or "cerebral play."
Bely's early version of this process in The Silver Dove is significant
for two reasons. First of all, it shows how far his conception of symbolic
perception had developed in comparison to his early essays in which a
90
Andrei Bely
perceiver could see the transcendent underpinnings of things by irradiating them, as it were, with his inner experiences. In his Symphonies
Bely had progressed from this view to conceiving of the component that
an individual contributes to a symbolic perception or image (as opposed to the component derived from the world outside the perceiver)
as being rooted in the transcendent. Now, in The Silver Dove, Bely has
approached the next logical step (which he will only actually take in Petersburg): he further decreases man's role in the creative process, and,
instead, has the transcendent totally dominate matterto the extent of
seeming to create it ex nihilo. This is also a progression beyond having
a spiritual realm merely control an individual s perceptions, as was the
case with Musatov, or Fekla Matveevna Eropegina, for example.
The second highly significant side of this development in Bely s conception of symbolic cognition is that it does much to explain why Bely
should have taken so readily to anthroposophy some three years after
he had completed The Silver Dove. There are major parallels between
anthroposophy and Bely's own theory of symbolism on the one hand,
and the world view he embodied in Petersburg on the other. Paramount
among these is the similarity of his (apparently independently formulated) conception of "self-thinking thoughts" incarnating as matter, and
the anthroposophical view of the nature of the tie between the material
and spiritual planes of being.
The final category of evidence I would like to bring to bear on the
question of the extent to which characters are free to mold their own
fates is the elaborate sequence of cause and effect relationships that
Bely creates in his novel. I will return to this in Petersburg, where the
entire plot hinges on a receding sequence of interlocking causes that ultimately abuts on the transcendent. In The Silver Dove the analogous
sequence seals Darialsky's fate with the Doves.
After having noticed Matrena in church, Petr returns to Gugolevo,
the Baroness' estate, to find his fiance, Katia. Although he has been
shaken by the sight of Matrena, he has not yet been won over by her or
the spells with which Kudeiarov has filled her. In Gugolevo, his tie to
Katia weathers a crisis brought on by her wanting to know if he had
ever been involved with other women. He had been, but Katia's love
for him allows her to accept him as he is: "She endured everything
and forgave everything." Petr then "rose from the ground, girded with
the strength of her love for the coming battle" (I, 215:164-65). It proves
insufficient, however, and the sequence of events that follows shows
the futility of his reliance on himself and the positive, but weak force
Katia represents.
91
The causal sequence begins with Katia's grandmother, a highly temperamental old lady. Although at first very much opposed to Darialsky, she finally accepts him as her granddaughter's betrothed (1,163:
125). It so happens that many years ago the Baroness had toyed with
the affections of young merchant Eropegin (I, 192: 147), who has since
developed into the local tycoon. By establishing a conflict between the
young Westernized Baroness and the callow, but authentically Russian
merchant, Bely in fact implies causalities that go far back into prenovelistic time. Even though Bely does not make Eropegin into a bearer
of patriarchal merchant sensibilities in the style of Ostrovsky, Melnikov-Pechersky, or Shmelev, the merchant is made to feel inferior by the
Baroness because of his native provincialism. This focus shows the relations between him and the Baroness as stemming ultimately from Petrine Russia, when the massive importation of European influences into
the country led to the alienation of the aristocracy from the relatively
unaffected lower classes. (Bely will make even more dramatic use of
this turning point in Russian history in Petersburg.) Thus it is a very
striking "coincidence" that while Petr is still at Gugolevo, the same Eropegin suddenly arrives, unannounced and accompanied by the shady
General Chizhikov. It turns out that the merchant has engaged in financial chicanery by means of which he hopes to ruin the Baroness and
steal her estate. The General, a highly amusing character, has the minor function in the plot of stealing the Baroness' diamonds, an event
that was to be a link with Petersburg, according to Bely's original plan.
Eropegin s long-delayed act of vengeance against the Baroness occurs
on a day when she has already had to deal with unrest among her peasants (a local echo of the 1905 Revolution). Deeply upset by the financial web in which the merchant appears to have entrapped her, the Baroness is also suddenly confronted by the grossly absurd and highly
inarticulate Chukholka, who, Petr correctly infers, arrives as some sort
of diabolical spawn. Darialsky is himself especially upset by Chukholka's reappearance in his life at this moment because he knows from bitter past experience that Chukholka always brings misfortune with him.
Unable to explain to the befuddled old lady who he is or what he is doing in the house, Chukholka becomes the focus of all her irritation and
wrath. She comes close to striking him, and he bursts into tears (I, 222:
170). At this crucial juncture, Petr, who had arrived on the scene with
Katia, and who cannot stand the sight of Chukholka crying, pushes the
Baroness away, grabs her hands, seizes her stick, and tosses it aside.
The narrator describes these impulsive actions as being caused by a
"swarm of little demons" that flew out of Chukholka like out of Pandora's box and entered Darialsky's chest. Finally, appalled that he dared to
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Andrei Bely
raise a hand against her, the Baroness delivers a fateful slap to Darialsky's face:
Mechanically, apparently even calmly, as if accomplishing the
inevitable, her raised hand unclenched on Petr's cheek: the slap
snapped ringingly in the air; five white fingers slowly caught fire
on Petr's pale skin: now the demons who had torn apart Chukholka's self-consciousness, penetrating the bodies of these people disarmed by rage, raised such a whirlwind that it seemed as if
the earth between them had collapsed and they all threw themselves into the yawning abyss. (I, 223: 171)
The untranslatable timing and rhythm of the characters' remarks and
movements in these scenes, as well as the beat of the narrative itself, are
among Bely's most dazzling achievements. Darialsky recognizes that he
has been formally insulted, and although he understands the helpless
panic that caused the old lady to hit him, he cannot stop himself from
acting as though he had indeed been deeply offended:
Like a whirlwind it also entered his consciousness that now,
this very minute, he would consider himself insulted and would
leave Gugolevo forever, and that he would have to spend the
night in Tselebeevo: and while he was thinking this way, he was already beginning to feel insulted and saw that his presence here was
impossible: turning around, he quickly clattered out the door on
his heels; his vengeful enemy had carried out his execution:
fate
was returning him to those places from which he had
escaped
only yesterday [italics mine]. (I, 2 2 4 : 1 7 1 )
Thus the intricate network of causes and effects linking disparate people over decades (and, by implication, centuries) conspires to make the
Baroness betray her kindly feelings for Petr and act in a way that would
return him to the Doves. That Bely was able to create such a marvelously convincing and complex fate for Petr suggests that he himself
must have been convinced of the receding chains of causes that move
men's lives, and seems to me to be conclusive evidence for seeing Bely
as a confirmed fatalist. 17
-8-
93
author himself. He claims an absolute reality for his fictional characters by making them the product of his own "cerebral play," or, in other
words, the reification of thoughts that pass through him from the transcendent. This view of creativity is another logical step in the direction
of making all human activity totally dependent on the transcendent: if
characters' thoughts as well as deeds ultimately derive from spiritual
dimensions, how can the author's be any different? And how, in Bely's
view, can what comes from the realm of the spirit not be real when spirit is
real? (This conception will provide the higher level of unity that resolves the tension between the lyrical and narrative sections in Bely's
prose fiction.)
There is a hint of this extreme view in The Silver Dove as well. In his
preface to the first book edition of the novel, Bely explains that although his Doves resemble a sect of contemporary Russian flagellants,
known as the khlysty, they do not exist in fact. However, he adds the
following suggestive qualification: "but they are possible with all their
insane inclinations; in this sense my doves are completely real." 18
By itself, this statement does not go farther than Dostoevsky's wellknown footnote to the first part of Notes From the Underground, in
which he says that although the author of the Notes is of course a fiction, such individuals "not only may, but even must exist in our society," if one takes into account the conditions under which the society
was formed. Dostoevsky's footnote may be understood as an illustration of his concept of "fantastic realism," or the extrapolation to its extreme of some existing ideology for the purpose of showing where it
could lead.
But in the context of The Silver Dove, and with other works in the
background, Bely's prefatory comment seems to reach farther than
this. When Katia visits Schmidt after Darialsky left her, Schmidt summarizes Petr's plight in the following words: "his tale [povest'] is absurd
and ugly; it's as if it were narrated by an enemy mocking the entire
bright future of our native land" (I, 299: 228). Povest', a long narrative
tale, rather than roman, a novela distinction that does not survive
translation, and is not a radical one in Russianis how Bely subtitled
the first two separate book editions of The Silver Dove before changing
to roman in the third. Thus Schmidt's talking of Petr's povest' evokes
associations with the work itself and not just the story of his sorry fate.
But could Bely have been implying, through the venerable Schmidt's
words, that he, as the author, was himself the agent of the "enemy"
(presumably the devil) who mocks Russia's future? In other words, did
Bely think that he too was motivated by the proto-apocalyptic forces
that rule over the world he depicted? Bely's veneration of Soloviev, as
well as his authentic apocalypticism and numerous occult experiences,
94
Andrei Bely
95
96
Andrei Bely
97
safed differing glimpses into physical and spiritual realms that constitute the fullness of reality only when they are combined. Their voices
change in accordance with the depths (or heights) to which they see at
any given moment; and the surprising wisdom of a provincial chronicler, whose language is full of local color, is due to his having been
touched by some aspect of the transcendent.
An alternative way to understand the narrator's voices is to see them
as expressions of various levels of consciousness coexisting within one
individual. New experiences awaken different levels in the narrator at
different times; this is, in fact, the narrative principle in Kotik Letaev.
Bely apparently also cultivated a similar pluralism in viewpoints with
regard to his own life. His widow recalls how in the course of action or
in the midst of emotion Bely was capable of distancing himself from it
and speaking in an entirely different tone of voice about what he was
doing or experiencing.27
Support for these interpretations of Bely's narrative practice can be
found in his essay on Gogol, written during the same year as The Silver
Dove.2' As one might expect, Bely approaches Gogol as a kindred spirit.
He estimates his works very highly, and places his stylistic achievements on the same level as Nietzsche's. Identifying Gogol the man with
the narrative personae he created in his works (an inevitable temptation for a Symbolist), Bely concludes that Gogol straddled two
worldsthat of humble matter, and that of mysterious spiritual dimensions. "In his images, in his attitude toward the earth," Bely ai-gues,
"Gogol had already crossed the frontiers of art . . . . [and] thrown
himself into the abyss of his second T"by which he means Gogol's
transcendent cosmic self. Gogol thus
stepped onto paths which one must not enter without having
worked out a specific occult plan, and without an experienced
counsellor. Instead of uniting his empirical "I" with his universal
"I" [s 'ia' mirovym], Gogol sundered the tie between the two "I's,"
and a black abyss lay between them.
Bely goes on to claim that Gogol's earthbound self was "horrified by
contemplating Shponkas and radishes"a reference to Gogol's comparison of the title character of a story with a radish; while Gogol's cosmic self "soared in the immeasurable reaches of other worldsthere,
beyond the vault of heaven." 29 But when Gogol experienced the summons of the otherworldly, he did not have the necessary esoteric wisdom about "the mystery of love" to unite his terrestrial and spiritual
selves.
98
Andrei Bely
The Silver
Dove
99
Petersburg
3
As above, so below.
Hermes Trismegistus, Tabula Smaragdina
Petersburg
101
rebuff from Sofia Petrovna that prompted Nikolai to make the patricidal offer to the revolutionaries in the first place. An additional subplot
involves the machinations of the enigmatic agent-provocateur Lippanchenko, who uses Dudkin to coerce Nikolai into fulfilling his promise.
However, a sketch of the plot suggests very little of Petersburg's intriguing complexity. An atmosphere of frenzied hallucination and
apocalyptic foreboding pervades the novel. The city itselfin the form
of vast, troubling vistas and agitated street scenesswells repeatedly
from mere background into an entity that receives as much authorial
attention as major protagonists are given in traditional nineteenth-century novels. The narrators different voices intrude freely into the text
with passages about Russia's destiny, recollections of Bely's own anguished past, and digressions about the nature of fiction, language, and
symbolism. Characters have febrile visions of spiritual realms and suffer encounters with otherworldly beings. The work is filled with numerous and obvious echoes from classical Russian literature, including
works by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, all of which Bely
transmutes and fuses with his own themes and perceptions into a verbal amalgam that is unique in Russian and European letters.
The uniqueness of the world in the novel is further enhanced by the
narrator's highly elliptical form of communication. This is perhaps the
single most important effect Bely achieved, or better to say, augmented,
when he abridged the novel in 1922. He cut more or less full exchanges
between characters and descriptions of events to a minimum, with the
result that the new text contains numerous passages teetering on the
edge of unintelligibility. The reader must therefore participate actively
in the workmuch more than is usually the casein order to infer the
necessary continuations and conclusions. (Though the impulse may
have been the same, Bely's practice and devices in the revised version of
Petersburg are a far cry from the frequently primitive elliptical communication of his First and other Symphonies.) The cuts Bely made
strengthen the general impression the novel producesthat the world
in it is difficult to apprehend, and that it "flickers" between being and
not being fully visible to perceivers in the text, or intelligible to its readers. The difficulty in making sense of the work is further increased by
its nervous narrative texture, as the narrator leaps constantly from one
to another of the planes of being that comprise his multidimensional
world. Indeed, Bely confessed to using an elaborate "cut and paste"
technique when writing the novel, which may have contributed to this
characteristic. 3 His refusal to signal clearly shifts among the various
plot strands also adds to the seeming chaos of events and places. In
these features, Bely leaves far behind the more traditional form of the
novel he utilized in The Silver Dove and returns to the avant-garde
modes of the Symphonies.
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Andrei Bely
If on the level of plot, setting, character, and narrative style Petersburg represents a significant break with The Silver Dove, on the level of
symbolic methodand the conception of man's tie to the transcendent
that underlies itthe second novel is a direct development of trends existing in the first. Before turning to these and related central issues in
Petersburg, however, a word is in order about the state of Bely's theorizing on the subject by the end of the first decade of this century.
Bely collected the bulk of his most important essays on symbolism in
three volumes, published when he was beginning to work on Petersburg in earnest. The essays from the early and middle years of the decade were also included, which is a measure of their continuing relevance for Bely at the decade's end. As he admitted himself, however, a
number of his latest and most important essays, which contain signifi-
Petersburg
103
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Andrei Bely
this interpntration, neither the self nor the world can be said to exist:
both arise only in the process of being connected in sound.9
Later in the essay, Bely extends his ideas about a "third world" of
acoustic symbols to symbols in general. He makes the significant argument that the creation of an image grants it a mode of being that is independent of the creative consciousness. The symbol becomes an "incarnation" and "comes to life." In this way metaphor leads to the creation
of myth. 10
I mentioned in the preceding chapters that some problems remain
unresolved in Bely's early theoretical formulations about symbolic cognition. One source of difficulty stems from the nature of the relationship between man and the transcendent. When Bely speaks of symbols
being created by an artist or perceiver who infuses some image taken
from outside himself with experiences deriving from within his self, it is
difficult to see how this could lead to anything other than solipsism if
"inner experiences" are understood in a straightforward manner, as
something confined to the individual's psyche. It is not clear why or
how an "irradiation" of a phenomenon by the perceiver's thoughts and
emotions should spontaneously lead to any insight into spiritual dimensions that lie beyond the material plane. The entire process seems
too active. And if Platonic Ideas exist in phenomena, a passive receptivity to their signals (whatever these could be) might seem more in order.
Bely began to resolve this problem in his theoretical, and especially
in his belletristic writings by making man's inner experiences stem ultimately from the transcendent. With this modification, the individual's
act of creative perception becomes a "mere" conduit for impulses from
the transcendent, which manifest themselves as what he sees. This sort
of cognitive dependency was dramatized in the case of Musatov in the
Second Symphony and Darialsky in The Silver Dove, and becomes the
central process in Bely's next two novels.
Indeed, in Petersburg, and in his essays from the end of the decade,
Bely decreases further man's role in defining the world in which he exists, and grants this function to forces rooted in the otherworldly realm
that act through man.
This development rests on the second cornerstone of Bely's theory,
which is formulated fully by the end of the decade. It is expressed most
completely in "The Emblematics of Meaning," where Bely posits a transcendent unity, that, although unknowable in its essence, is the ultimate ground of all that exists. Proceeding from this unity, one realizes,
for example, that the goal of all symbolizing activity is the recognition
that individuals are actually part of a whole: "I, you, heare one, . . .
Petersburg
105
father, mother and sonare one." In turn, the unity that individuals
comprise is a symbol of something yet higher: "the mystery that is not
being revealed" (neraskryvaiushchaiasia
taina).11
Bely also extends his conception to include all forms of h u m a n activity. He differentiates between "symbols" in general and the universal,
ultimate "Symbol." The former are the various products of the interaction of individual subjects with the world a r o u n d them. The latter is the
unattainable transcendent absolute; and the relation between the two is
that the Symbol spawns symbols. When an artist creates symbols, or
when an individual makes perceptions, he is in fact submitting to the
will of this absolute that acts through him and brings everything into
existence. Similarly, the world in which an individual thinks he lives is
actually "a dream" created in him b y this unknowable absolute. 1 2
According to Bely, the Symbol can be conceived in eschatological
terms. Thus "The Emblematics of Meaning" posits a transcendent, teleological process in the universe that makes itself manifest in the world
of m a n through the seemingly independent symbolizing actions of individuals. 13 This concept, which lies at the very heart of Bely's world view,
is one of the most seminal in his entire theoretical corpus for understanding Petersburg, and represents the final resolution of the problematic
view of symbolic cognition that he broached in his first theoretical essay.
Implicit in this schema is the continual nature of man's symbolizing
activity. The Absolute reveals itself gradually, through the ever-growing "creative striving" of man. 1 4 Hence individual symbols will reflect
the Absolute with varying degrees of distinctness, and the boundaries
between them will be fluid. For, if all symbols reflect the Symbol, then
all symbolic images must inevitably have something in c o m m o n a
feature that is amply borne out in Petersburg.
Bely's belief in a transcendent explains the considerable pains he took
to disassociate his theory of symbolism f r o m mere estheticism. In his
memoir Between Two Revolutions,
Bely recalls h o w unimpressed he
was with the theoretical arguments of French Symbolists, some of
w h o m he saw while in Paris in 1906. It all seemed to him to be "the
ABC's" of The Scales, an important Symbolist journal edited by Valry
Briusov in Moscow, to which Bely contributed frequently. Bely concludes that Briusov, for one, "overestimated" the French writers, and
that their practice of "symbolism as a n a r r o w little school is impossible." 15 Indeed, f r o m his earliest essays to the end of his life Bely was interested ultimately in nothing less than the "re-creation" of man. In an
essay f r o m 1909 he spoke of Zarathustra, Buddha, and Christ as being
"artists of life" as much as givers of law. 16 A n d speculating about the future, Bely prophesied that symbolism would become a new religiophilosophical teaching and cease being a "mere" theory. 17
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Some of Bely's later essays in this vein seem to extol the existential
duties of the individual toward his own self-creation. 18 However, this
view can still be reconciled with Bely's belief in the Symbol if any existential act that an individual performs is understood as a veiled manifestation of a transcendent absolute. In Petersburg the narrator-author
will admit as much.
Bely's later theoretical ideas are strongly colored by his critical study
of Kant (whose views about man's ability to know the transcendent
were clearly antithetical to his own), and, especially in "The Emblematics of Meaning," the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert. Elsworth has
shown how Bely adapted the latter's concept of "value" to his own view
of symbolism as teleological creative cognition. 19 Two other thinkers
deserve special mention because of the direct influence their teachings
had on Petersburg. The first is Vladimir Soloviev, who remains as important for the works of Bely's mature middle period as he was for the
earliest, although Bely valued his "prophetic, mystical, intuitive spirit"
more than his philosophical side.20 The second figure is Rudolf Steiner
(1861-1925), the founder of anthroposophy.
The influence of Steiner on Bely is complex, and has yet to be studied
in the detail it deserves.21 In 1913, six years after striking off on his own
from the better-known theosophical movement (originally founded in
1875 by Elena Petrovna Blavatskaia [Mme. Blavatsky] and later led by
Annie Besant), Steiner formalized his departure by establishing a society dedicated to propagating his own staggeringly complicated esoteric
doctrine of "anthroposophy." His primary reason was that his Christological views were at odds with theosophy's reliance on ideas drawn
largely from Hinduism. In brief, anthroposophy, or the "occult science"
as Steiner also called it, is a highly syncretic and Hermetic view of existence: it teaches that both man and the earth are part of a spiritual universe undergoing an elaborate cyclical evolution. By means of certain
meditative exercises, an adept can come to know man's multileveled
spiritual composition and his intimate involvement in cosmic history.
As a result, he can become a self-conscious part of the teleologically
evolving cosmos, in which Christ is the central regenerative force.
Although Bely had been interested in theosophy and had known
something of anthroposophy earlier, he did not actually fall under
Steiner s spell until he met him in 1912, when he was working on Petersburg.22 Bely's commitment to the "occult science" was immediate and
total. He first followed Steiner around Europe to attend his peripatetic
lecture courses, then lived and worked in Steiners anthroposophical
community in Drnach, Switzerland, from 1914 to 1916. And despite
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personal frictions with Steiner himself in the early 1920s, Bely remained a fervent believer until his death in 1934. 2 3
The zeal with which Bely immersed himself in Steiner s doctrines left
a profound imprint on Petersburg, but anthroposophy alone does not
"explain" the novel. The reason is the lifelong habit Bely had of selectively adapting all the new ideas he encountered to those he already
held, even if this meant doing violence to the integrity of the new system of belief. A striking example was his ability to reconcile in his early
essays figures as alien to each other as Soloviev and Nietzsche. 24 With
anthroposophy Bely's task must have been significantly easier. His
world view prior to his "conversion" and Steiners teachings have a
similar general shape: both are variants of metaphysical idealism and
present a transcendent spiritual realm undergoing a spiraling teleological evolution as the ultimate reality; in the end, all man can do is become a self-conscious participant in the process of which he is already a
part. 25 Indeed, Bely's theoretical essays have passages that anticipate,
to an uncanny degree, what he was to find soon in anthroposophy. 26
The poet Aleksandr Blok, to whom Bely sent detailed descriptions of
his early infatuation with anthroposophyand whom he visited soon
after becoming Steiners followercommented on this compatibility.
"If one knew of Steiner only from A. Bely," Blok wrote to a mutual
friend, "one would have thought that A. Bely himself invented him; he
keeps saying the same things and in the same way." 27
Bely himself realized perfectly well that there was much in common
between his theory of symbolism and anthroposophy. In his revealing
and valuable memoir Why I Became A Symbolist (1928), he echoes
Blok by asking the rhetorical question: "What changed in me when I
became an anthroposophist?" His answer is "Nothing." More specifically, Bely states that his theory of cognition was pointing in the same
direction as Steiners, and that a series of lectures Steiner gave in 1914
was, in effect, an anthroposophical "transcription" of his essay "The
Emblematics of Meaning" (1909). 2 8 Rather than being understood as
another instance of Bely's syncretism, however, these remarks should
be taken as confirmation that Bely and Steiner did undergo a convergent evolution in their ideas. Bely also found that the fundamental outlines of Soloviev's world view coincided with Steiner's, and that
Steiner s lectures in 1914 confirmed Soloviev's apocalypticism. 29
In the final analysis, as far as Petersburg is concerned, Bely took
those elements from anthroposophy that were already congruent with
the ideas he had formulated in theoretical essays and dramatized in a
nascent form in his earlier works. The "occult science" gave Bely a
structured and detailed metaphysics stressing the individual's ties to the
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much clearer when scenes in the novel are juxtaposed with specific passages from Steiner's writings.
-3One of the features that distinguishes Petersburg from Bely's other
belletristic works is that it contains narrative digressions about the nature of cognition. Metaliterary discussions, such as those that took
place in prefaces to the Second and Fourth Symphonies, have now
moved into the body of the work itself. On a purely formal level, the
effect of this is to blur the distinction between fiction and realitya
central preoccupation in the novel as a whole. It thus becomes possible
to examine moments of symbolic cognitionscenes in which characters perceive and come to know somethingfrom three points of view:
(1) the criteria the narrator presents in the novel itself, (2) the theory of
symbolism Bely developed in his essays, and (3) anthroposophy.
The most revealing of the digressions comprises the last section of
Chapter I, and is entitled "You Will Never Ever Forget Him!" Ostensibly, this is a commentary on the encounter between Apollon Apollonovich and Dudkin on a city street and on several other characters and
settings that had just been introduced. However, the strategic location
of this section and the nature of the narrator's remarks suggest it may
be programmatic for the entire novel:
In this chapter we have seen Senator Ableukhov. We have also
seen the idle thoughts of the senator in the form of the senator's
house and the form of the senator's son, who also carries his own
idle thoughts in his head. Finally, we have seen another idle shadowthe stranger.
This shadow arose by chance in the consciousness of Senator
Ableukhov and acquired its ephemeral being there. But the consciousness of Apollon Apollonovich is a shadowy consciousness
because he too is the possessor of an ephemeral being and the
fruit of the author's fantasy: unnecessary, idle cerebral play. (I,
72: 35)
This remarkable passage posits the primacy of thought or imagination
over realityan idea that Bely had expressed in earlier works, both
belletristic and theoretical. What is new about it is that reality is now
seen as a series of hierarchically arranged levels: the senator exists because the author imagines him, and the "stranger" (Dudkin) exists because the senator imagines him. But the chain does not stop here.
"Idle cerebral play" is the central concept in this passage, and because
the narrator involves himself in its operation, he implicitly raises the
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two scenes in The Silver Dove. In one, Eropegin and General Chizhikov appear as reifications of Darialsky's thoughts, and in the second,
devils swarm around the Baroness, Darialsky, and Chukholka as reifications of the inner experiences that appear to have been induced in
them by forces outside them. The new feature added to this schema in
Petersburg is that the role of the world outside the perceiver in the creative cognitive process seems to be totally devalued.
In some of his earlier essays Bely described symbolic cognition as an
individual's projection of some aspect of himself onto the external
world, which exists in a "potential" stateready to participate, as it
were, in the creation of symbols. But when Dudkin is created by the
thoughts in the senator's head, the reader is not shown that some material part of the St. Petersburg cityscape is infused with the senator's enlivening gaze; instead, Dudkin is described as springing fully formed
out of the senator's head, like Athena out of the head of Zeus, as the
narrator puts it (I, 47: 21). This would seem to be an extension of the
view Bely developed in his later essays about inner experiences being
rooted in the transcendent and about creative cognition (which produces symbols) being itself an emanation of the Absolute Symbol.
The idea that thoughts can come to life was also clearly anticipated
in the essay "The Magic of Words," in which Bely described an artist
creating metaphors that live on as myth. The difference between the
novel and this essay is that the importance of the role of the individual
in producing living thoughts is devalued in Petersburg. Apollon Apollonovich is quite unaware that a "birth" has taken place in him. But his
experience is also consistent with an idealistic universe, and illustrates
Bely's implicit denigration of free will in the novel as a whole.
The concept of thoughts taking on a life of their own is also a link between Bely and anthroposophy. The instances of thoughts apparently
becoming living creatures in The Silver Dove show that Bely was already on this track in 1909. Whether, as is most likely, this was an inevitable outgrowth of Bely's own theorizing, or a consequence of some
chance encounter with occult lore before he became a follower of
Steiner in 1912, is a question that cannot be answered decisively. Bely's
readings in philosophy and mysticism were sufficiently voracious to
encompass almost any ideas current during the first decade of this century. (See, for example, the bibliographical references in his voluminous
notes to the essays in Simvolizm.) Moreover, he had numerous encounters with practicing occultists, including anthroposophists, and engaged
in meditative techniques himself before he met Steiner. 35 Bely actually
believed that these ideas were his own: "That reality is created by us in
the activities of creative cognition, and is not served up to us on the
world platter, was perfectly well known to me before Steiners books." 36
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Andrei Bely
cal essays. It is a reflection of his conception of symbolism as a new religio-philosophical teaching that is destined to transform mankind. Bely's involvement with Steiner could only have reinforced this view
because anthroposophy had, and still has an explicitly didactic conception of its own role in the world. Moreover, the reader who follows
through consistently the implications of the narrator's digression is
forced to conclude that in Bely's view Petersburg was an "inspired"
textone that was produced by the same forces shown to operate
within the text. This is also a feature of the works of Steiner, who
thought of himself as one of those great teachers of mankind about
whom he often wrote. (A collection of his lectures is entitled The Fifth
Gospel, which presumably places him on the same level as the four
evangelists of the New Testament.) A desire to instruct the reader in
higher truths may be the reason why the narrator tries to buttonhole
the reader throughout the novel, revealing things about the characters
and the world in general that the characters themselves do not know,
which the reader must arrange into a coherent schema for himself. The
readers efforts, under the author's guidance, might be seen, therefore,
as a reenactment of the adept's quest for enlightenment in anthroposophy.
-4The metacognitive digression at the end of Chapter I indicates that in
order to understand the world of Petersburg it is essential to understand the forces for which cerebral play is a mask. But first, it is necessary to establish that the process described in the digression does in fact
operate in the rest of the novelthat thoughts become incarnated and
cosmic forces enter characters' minds. Since I will argue that a great
transcendent unity underlies the world in the novel, it is completely artificial to stop the examination of how the above-mentioned process
operates at any point short of that unity. Nevertheless, it will be necessary to do so, at least temporarily, in order to keep the development of
my argument orderly.
The consistency with which Bely applies his process to the confrontation between Apollon Apollonovich and Dudkin leads to an amusing, and, at first glance, bewildering circularity. After establishing that
Dudkin originated in the senator's head, the narrator explains that the
stranger's thoughts have the same properties as the senator's: "They
would escape and take on substance" (I, 47: 20). One of the stranger's
escaped thoughts is that he really exists, and this thought "fled back
into the senatorial brain. . . . The circle closed." The congruence of the
thoughts that occur in Dudkin and the senator implies that they originate in a common source. The world seems to be a composite, therefore,
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of separate intrusions of a given thought into individual consciousnessesa schema that vitiates the strictly hierarchical arrangement of
levels of reality in the narrator's digression, but, at the same time, tends
to dissolve the distinction between creator and artifact, or reality and
the novel. (The circular path of the thought is also one of the numerous
manifestations of the important sphere symbol in the novel.)
In the first chapter Bely also shows that quotidian things and places
are products of the senator's induced cogitations, as if to demonstrate
that he can account for all aspects of the world with his cognitive process. In a number of striking passages, the senator's brain is literally
identified with his house, with the result that the identity of thought
and reality is illustrated graphically. A servant is described as climbing
steps that are "soft, like the convolutions of the brain." And when the
senator hears a door slam in a corridor "it was only a hammering in the
temples" (I, 47-48: 21).
The dominant characteristic of cerebral play, however, is its consistently intrusive character. When the senator is at work in his office, cerebral play moves into the senator's mind more than once:
His innocent cerebral play again moved spontaneously into his
brain, that is, into the pile of papers and petitions. Apollon Apollonovich perhaps would have considered cerebral play on the
same plane as the wallpaper of the room; the plane, however, in
moving apart at times, admitted a surprise into the center of his
mental life. (1,45:19)
Each intrusion generates a new aspect of the senator's world. At first it
is his paperwork and his office space. Then it is his "memory" of having
seen Dudkin in his own home before meeting him on the street. But
rather than being simply an elaborate way of describing the workings
of memory, this passage, in the light of the narrator's metacognitive digression, implies that memory, like all other thoughts, originates outside the human mind. (This is a point that Bely will develop extensively
in his next novel, Kotik Letaev.)
An essential characteristic of intruding thoughts is that they function
didactically. They often impart new information, but in keeping with
the general tendency in the novel, it is almost invariably of more use to
the reader than to the characters, who are little affected by it. (Toward
the end of the novel Dudkin struggles briefly against the compulsion to
murder Lippanchenko, and Nikolai Apollonovich seems to enter onto
a new spiritual path by reading the Ukrainian mystical philosopher
Skovoroda; nevertheless, neither one experiences anything like the
drastic reorientation of character and consequent change in behavior
that can be found in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.) A rather blatant example
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sumably as a consequence of cerebral play). 39 Steiners published writings confirm this identification. He explains that the adept can accustom himself "to a mode of thinking that does not derive its content from
sense-observations." As a result, he comes to discover the existence of a
"thought world" that has an inner life of its own. By surrendering to this
special "sense-free thinking" (sinnlichkeitfreies
Denken), the adept
finds himself "in the region of a living supersensible world." And anyone who enters this state would say that something "thinks in me," or
that "Something possessing the nature of being acts within me."
Steiner is careful to differentiate between "thought associations one
creates arbitrarily and those one experiences when one silences this arbitrary volition." 40 Thus, "sense-free thought" in this conception is
strictly applicable only to occult experiences. Bely uses a modified version of Steiner's idea, therefore. Rather than leave the "thought world"
accessible only to self-conscious occultists, Bely makes "cerebral play"
and "self-thinking thoughts" into a part of nearly every character's existence. Moreover, the special cogitations come by themselves and are
not sought by the characters in the novel. This universalization of
anthroposophy's teachings typifies Bely's tactic in Petersburg as a
whole: he consistently imbues with a will of their own aspects of the
spiritual realm that in anthroposophy must be courted by initiates. In
so doing, Bely abandons an important tenet of anthroposophy (and
Christianity): that man has free will. But at the same time, he remains
faithful to the deterministic view of existence that he dramatized in his
Symphonies and in The Silver Dove.
The scene with Nikolai also illustrates the effect that the awareness
of Bely's reliance on several of anthroposophy's basic concepts has on
one's reading of the novel as a whole. The narrator's reference to selfthinking thoughts about patricide should not be understood as Bely's
attempt to dramatize Nikolai recoiling from accepting personal responsibility for a crime he has contemplated. Such a straightforward, psychological reading of the scene (if psychology is understood as dealing
with processes in the human mind alone) is invalidated by the occult
meaning that anthroposophy gives to "self-thinking thoughts," a meaning that is in harmony with the narrator's digressions in the novel, as
well as with Bely's theory of symbolism, and his own experiences: his
widow described how much he enjoyed "self-thinking thoughts," which
he characterized as "singing" throughout his entire body.41
Later in the novel, the narrator refers to the phenomenon of intruding thoughts in yet another way. Nikolai tries to deny that the bomb he
is to use is still in the house. Thoughts appear that correct his wishful
thinking, and Nikolai realizes that it is not he who is thinking, but a
"conscious contour" outside his body. The contour affirms that the
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Shishnarfne's withdrawal into Dudkin's throat is also another instance of Bely's imaginative use of anthroposophic beliefs. According
to Steiner, adepts striving to perceive the spiritual realm develop "psycho-spiritual organs" called "lotus flowers." These appear in various
parts of the student's body, including the forehead, the solar plexus,
and, most important for Dudkin, the larynx. It is by means of these "organs," which are visible only to spiritual sight, that students can commune with the higher world.
Bely does not mention any "lotus flowers." Nevertheless, the entire
scene with Shishnarfne seems to have been modeled very closely on
Steiner's conception of how initiates commune with the transcendent:
T h e impressions [from the spiritual world] that resemble most
those of the sense world are the tones of the spiritual world. . . .
These tones, however, are not experienced as something reaching
an organ from outside, but as a force streaming through the ego
out into the world. T h e human being feels the tones as he feels his
own speaking or singing in the sense world, but he knows that in
the spiritual world these tones streaming out from him are at the
same time manifestations
of other beings poured out into the
world through him [italics mine]. 4 2
Of course, in anthroposophy access to the spirit world is possible only
for those who have undergone special esoteric training. But although
there are hints in Petersburg that Dudkin has been involved with the
occult, there is clearly no suggestion that he actively sought to contact
Shishnarfne in this scene. A s a result, even he is shown to be a passive
victim of cerebral play.
Another, related element from anthroposophy that shows Shishnarfne to be a creature from the spiritual realm is the reversibility of his
name. It is obvious that the name is "enfranshish" spelled b a c k w a r d s
a word Dudkin used in his struggle against the Mongolian faces appearing on the wall of his attic. Moreover, "enfranshish," is an almost perfect transliteration into Cyrillic of "enfranchise," which, since it is a
word denoting "freedom," seems an appropriate choice for exorcising
hateful apparitions. In any case, Steiner explains that elements of the
spirit world, in addition to appearing as aspects of an individual's outer
world, also appear as mirror images of what they really are: "When,
for instance, a number is perceived, it must be reversed, as a picture in
a mirror; 265 would mean here in reality 5 6 2 . " 4 3 Shishnarfne repeats exactly the same idea at the end of his dialogue with Dudkin (II, 122:
208).
Shishnarfne's own words support the view that he is an intruder from
a spiritual realm. W h e n he becomes a voice emanating from Dudkin's
throat, he explains that St. Petersburg is
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Andrei Bely
novel; I made up nothing [italics mine]; I only spied on the actions of those appearing before me.
Bely explains that for weeks after the images of Petersburg first arose
before him, he felt totally enclosed in the alien and fantastical world
they created around him. "But I made up nothing . . . " h e repeats, "I
only listened, watched and read; the material was served up to me completely independently of me [italics mine], with an abundance exceeding my ability to accomodate it." And for a long time Bely felt that "the
limit between fiction and reality was lost" for him while he was working on the novel. 47
Bely's conception of artistic inspirationfor that is what seems to lie
behind his recollections of the novel's birthresembles closely a seizure of an artist by coercive cerebral play.48 (In fact, Bely acknowledged experiencing cerebral play in a letter from 1912, albeit not in relation to artistic creation.) 49 The appearance of images out of sounds is
part of the anthroposophical world view, and the recollection suggests
that Bely still held this view when he wrote the memoirs. Petersburg is
of course itself filled with numerous examples of alliteration that deserve to be studied from the point of view of anthroposophic teaching
about sound. 50 That Bely was deeply serious about viewing sounds as
agents of the spirit world is clear from his book-length treatise on the
subject, Glossaloliia, which he published in 1922, the year of his major
revision of Petersburg.
The impression that fiction and reality are a continuum for Bely is
also reinforced by the abrupt transition from his urban apostrophe to
the narrative that follows it. Nikolai Apollonovich suddenly appears
on the bridge that Bely, the narrator-author, said he had trod himself.
In the context of the apostrophe, this bridge, and presumably everything else in both the city and the novel, is a product of cerebral play.
Thus Nikolai Apollonovich on the narrator's bridge is also a product of
cerebral play, which, in turn, originates in the spiritual dimension hovering over and creating the city.
Other instances when the narrator intentionally merges fiction and
reality include his appearance on a street with his characters in the tellingly entitled chapter section, "Our role" (I, 49-50; 22), and at Apollon
Apollonovich's graveside (II, 163: 230-231). He also repeats that cerebral play applies to him and that it is responsible for the existence of his
characters and everything else in his story (II, 233: 265).
The special status of the city as straddling the boundary between the
ephemeral physical world and the transcendent world of spirit helps to
explain the narrator's reference to characters as shadows at the end of
Chapter I. Throughout the novel, in addition to calling the inhabitants
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Andrei Bely
three indented passages. His decision to save the bulk of them obviously
implies that he thought the device important.
In typographical layout alone, by appearing as embayments on the
page, the indented passages suggest intrusions into the text comparable
to the intrusions of the transcendent into human minds. Moreover, because of the blurring of the traditional division between narrator and
author in the novel, it is possible to see the indented passages as a typographical device representing the transcendent jogging the author's
writing hand, as it were, and, by implication, guiding it elsewhere in
the text. Even when the content of the passages is not radically different
from the surrounding text (which is more often than not the case), the
indented passages contain a sudden blossoming or expansion of a
thought or an image present in the context. Thus, the effect of thoughts
suddenly appearing "out of nowhere" is maintained.
Furthermore, because the reader is forced to read the pages containing the embayed passages in a special way, he experiences something
comparable, in the novel's terms, to a transcendent force acting on him.
The narrator-author's claim that his mental "creations" will be very real
for the reader is thereby reinforced. And on the level of the characters,
the indented passages function as another type of manifestation of the
transcendent's coercive role in their lives, evidence for which is abundant throughout the novel.
The content of the indented passages is fully in keeping with the intrusive form of the typographical device itself. Nearly half (thirteen)
can be said to deal in some way with the bomb and the events and symbols related to it. The novel's plot is built around the bomb, of course.
In addition to being literally a terrorist tool of assassination, the bomb
is also a central symbol of the coming apocalypse, and thus a synecdoche for the transcendent.
The bomb as such is not mentioned in all thirteen of the indented
passages. In several it is only implied: for instance, the passage dealing
with the stomach gases from which all the Ableukhovs suffer (II, 156:
226), and which foreshadow the rapid expansion of gases in the blast itself; or, to choose a different sort of example, the scene depicting Nikolai's revulsion at his father's physicality (II, 27-28:152), which was the
original motivation for his decision to murder his father.
The remaining fifteen indented passages address a variety of subjects. The first to occur in the novel is especially significant because it
deals with the Flying Dutchman, who, as the narrator describes it, sails
from the Baltic to conjure the spectral city of St. Petersburg out of the
clouds and mists of the Finnish marshes (I, 30: 10). The Flying Dutchman is another of Peter the Great's avatars in Petersburg, and as such is
justifiably thought of as one who has created something where there
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Andrei Bely
The remaining passages deal with a range of topics. One has Apollon
Apollonovich contemplating flowers. He does not distinguish varieties
and refers to all by one name (I, 47-48: 21). This maniacal projection of
a fixed category is a reflection of his general rigidity in the novel, which
is, in turn, an echo of the inflexibility Bely associated with "the Mongolian task" that the senator is unwittingly fulfilling. Another passage
deals with the dirty napkins and a washtub which Anna Petrovna can
see out of her hotel room window (II, 225: 266). This image is associated
with the problematic sexuality in the Ableukhov family that leads
to Nikolais patricidal plan (to which I shall return below). In a like
manner, associations can be found between each remaining passage
and some important theme or symbol cluster in the novel, all of which
ultimately point to the great apocalyptic unity underlying Petersburg
as a whole. Similarly indented passagesexpressive of comparable
cosmic intrusionsappear in works Bely wrote after Petersburg, including Kotik Letaev, Notes of an Eccentric, and The Baptized Chinaman.52
-6-
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This view evolves naturally from both the Biblical Apocalypse and
Soloviev's "Tale." It may also be that Bely s conception of the "yellow
peril" was influenced by another widely known eschatological work of
Soloviev'sa poem entitled "Pan-Mongolism" (written in 1894, first
published posthumously in 1905). It begins:
Pan-Mongolism! Although the word is strange,
It caresses my hearing,
It is as if it were full of portent
Of the grand fate ordained by God.
(Panmongolizm! Khot'slovo diko,/No mne laskaetslukh ,/Kak by
predvestiem velikoi/Sud'biny
Bozhiei polno.) Bely's transvaluation of
evil is fully in keeping with Soloviev's formulation (although he does
not stress the theme of divine punishment as much as Soloviev does in
the rest of the poem). Bely also preserves the poem's privileged, divine
point of view about events on earth.
To the limited extent that characters react consciously to Asiatic and
other manifestations of the transcendent, however, they are routinely
frightened by them. Dudkin's experiences are especially nightmarish.
And even the narrator descends at times to the "human" level of the
characters, from whose point of view the horror of existence just prior
to the apocalypse is quite palpable. 60
The generally dark atmosphere pervading the novel represents another significant departure on Bely's part from the spirit of anthroposophy. Although Steiner describes cosmic catastrophes and the struggle
between good and evil in his works, the dominant tone of his writings
and his world view is optimistic. This lightness of tone is largely absent
from Petersburg, for several reasons. As Bely acknowledged in his
memoir Between Two Revolutions, Petersburg is filled with recollections of his extraordinarily tormenting affair with Blok's wife in 1906.
This appears in the narrator-author's own intrusive digressions, as well
as in Nikolai Apollonovich's involvement with Sofia Petrovna Likhutina. In addition to this personal reason, Bely's Solovievian apocalypticism, although conflated with anthroposophical beliefs, still plays
a more important role than does Steiner's brighter cosmology. Finally,
Bely's fatalismevident in all of his earlier belletristic workswould
necessarily lead him to stress catastrophe and coercion in human existence in preference to anthroposophy's triumphant image of the successfully self-transcending clairvoyant. Even in Kotik Letaev, Bely's
most orthodox anthroposophical work, the protagonist's anguished experiences probably represent more of a continuum with the author's
own past views and experiences than a faithful reflection of Steiners
teachings.
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body, and what had been "organs of movement" in his previous state of
being became "rudiments of hands." 6 4
The adventure the senator has is an imaginative and somewhat humorous recapitulation of these events. The narrator describes the senator's consciousness as existing in "pretemporal gloom" before it senses
something outside itself by means of extensions of itself that are like
arms. Moreover, the stuff of which man and the earth were fashioned
during Steiner's ancient Moon cycle is rather like the fluid which the
senator's consciousness encounters, albeit without being revolting. It
was "even denser than the water of today" and a "viscous element"; it
was like "turf, slime or spinach"; and the beings of that age were like
"Jelly fish and slimy creatures such as are still to be seen today." 6 5
In anthroposophy, the astral body, if not controlled by higher spiritual faculties, can have a destructive effect on the whole of man. The
Moon cycle thus represents something akin to a fall in human cosmic
history. 66 Steiner did not consider human sexuality to be intrinsically
evil. But an "important proposition" of his teachingand one that is directly relevant to the senator's situation in Petersburgis that "the
higher, more noble divine forces have an affinity with theapparentlylower forces of human nature." The "forces of reproduction" are
"base" only when man misuses them, "when he compels them to serve
his passions and instincts." But when man "ennobles them through the
insight that a divine spiritual power lies in them . . . [he places] these
forces at the service of the development of the earth, and through his
forces of reproduction he will carry out the intentions of the higher entities." 67
This is precisely the task that the senator's sexuality fulfills in the
novel, as can be shown by tracing the connections among sexuality, Nikolai, and the bomb around which the novel's plot is built. Even the
whole city and its inhabitants are touched by a sexual aura, which, in
the context of anthroposophy, has its origin in the transcendent. As I
mentioned, the inhabitants of the islands were called a "bastard race" in
the first version of the novel. Bely s oblique reference to his involvement with Blok's wife also evokes the theme of lust, but on the level of
the novel's narrator-author. Moreover, his frequent references to the
"waters teeming with bacilli" in the city's canals, and to the penetrating
moisture of its atmosphere, recall the foul liquids of the senator's vision
and family life, and suggest that the entire city is literally saturated
with Moon cycle influence.
That the senator's multivalent dream voyage consists of two
phasesthe Mongol, and the bathtubis suggested by his double
awakening: the narrator refers to "a double dream" (I, 178: 95). The
link between the two is the apocalyptic destruction that the Mongol
and the senator's lust both imply.
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Andrei Bely
in the senator's vision makes about the absence of norms can be reconciled with the ancient Turanian's more narrowly focused message, unless these two representatives of the spirit world are speaking from two
different points of viewthe first from a broader one encompassing
the apocalypse in its entirety. Indeed, such a tactic is not unlike Bely's
use of multiple view points in the Second Symphony in order to give a
multifaceted perspective on some topic or event. In the same w a y that
the different perspectives combined in the Second Symphony to provide a full picture of true reality, so do the apparently contradictory remarks that the son and the father hear in the spirit world.
The visions of father and son reveal a profound identity between
them, which is all the more striking since on the surface they are depicted
as being total antagonists. By showing that they share a common
ground in a spiritual realm, Bely has suggested a reason for their psychological similarity, and more important, has given the reader a
glimpse of an aspect of the all-embracing unity that is the highest reality
in the world of the novel. He also illustrated the theoretical formulation I cited above: "I, you, heare one . . . father, mother, and son are
one," from the essay in which he discussed h o w symbolizing activity
gradually reveals the unity of all in the Symbol.
Although the Turanian in the vision condemns a violent destruction
of the existing order, the identification of Nikolai with the b o m b remains. Just before he awakens, the narrator says that Nikolai "understood, that he himself was a bomb. And he burst with a boom" (II, 53:
168). He is not just under pan-Mongolian control, therefore, but seems
to be an unwitting agent of the apocalypse as a whole.
In a sense, then, the senator has fathered a bomb. In fact the whole
Ableukhov family is the unwitting victim of transcendent forces moving the world toward apocalyptic catastrophe. This was the implication of a passage that was radically abbreviated in the 1922 and 1928
editions of Petersburg. After describing the senator's catalog of possessions, the narrator says of the Ableukhov home:
In the lacquered house the storms of life flowed noiselessly; nonetheless, the storms of life flowed destructively here . . . they tore
the air out of the hoarse throat with a stream of poisonous fluids;
and some kind of cerebral games whirled around in the consciousness of the inhabitants, like thick vapors in hermetically
sealed tanks. (1916: p. 7)
Many important thematic strands are tied together in these canceled
lines. The b o m b image appears in the moving vapors sealed under pressure. In turn, they are connected with cerebral play, which evokes the
entire process of creative cognition operating in the novel. The Ableu-
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khov family drama is implied by "storms of life" as well as by "poisonous fluids," which recall the foul liquids associated with the senator's
lust. Furthermore, the entire scene between Dudkin and Shishnarfne is
anticipated in the image of something erupting out of a hoarse throat.
Despite this deletion, however, the association of family, lust, and
the bomb remains in the later versions of the novel, and explains how
the Sofia Petrovna subplot is linked to the main, patricidal plot in Petersburg. Nikolai's offer to the revolutionaries to kill his father was motivated by her rebuff to his sexual advances. He felt deeply humiliated,
and translated his disgust with himself into a desire to destroy his father. As the narrator explains, Nikolai was moved by his sense of
shame about the physical act that conceived him: "He transferred the
shame of his conception to his father" (II, 161: 229). In a sense, Nikolai
inherited his father's problematic sexuality, and Sofia Petrovna, in unleashing the problem, becomes a participant in the appearance of the
bomb. Her role as an unwitting agent of apocalyptic destruction is further suggested by her acting as a courier with Lippanchenko's note instructing Nikolai to proceed with his promised patricide.
This intricate chain of causes that goes back in time before Nikolai
was even born recalls the similarly involved sequences of causes and effects that led Baroness Todrabe Graaben to slap Darialsky in The Silver
Dove and thus propel him irrevocably toward the Doves. In Petersburg
the ultimate causes are lost in even more remote times and dimensions.
If the Baroness is ultimately the product of Peter the Great's drastic
Westernizing changes in Russia two hundred years before, the Ableukhovs' (and perhaps all Russians') problematic sexuality originates in
millennia long past, according to Steiners cosmogony. In his next novel,
Kotik Letaev, Bely will go even further in this direction and will make
an investigation of the cosmic origins of his (autobiographical) protagonist the work's central concern.
Of all the characters in Petersburg, Dudkin has the most striking encounters with representatives of the transcendent. Shishnarfne identifies himself as a Persian, so he is part of the generalized Asian presence
in the novel. Moreover, he reveals that Dudkin will commit an act that
was preordained in the "fourth-dimensional" spirit world, indicating
that his life is controlled from there: "you are also registered there. The
passport has been made out inside you. You yourself will put your signature on it inside you by performing an extravagant little action" (II,
121: 207). This act turns out to be the murder of Lippanchenko, which
is also the direct consequence of the Bronze Horseman literally intruding into Dudkin. After Shishnarfne withdraws into Dudkin's throat,
the dismounted statue of Peter breaks down the door to Dudkin's room
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Andrei Bely
(recalling Shishnarfne's words about the inhabitant from the fourth dimension whom not even a door can stop), and, melting, "He poured
into his veins" (II, 133: 214). When Dudkin accomplishes the murder,
he reveals that he was under the statue's influence by assuming the pose
that Peter has in Falconet's monument astride Lippanchenko's corpse
(II, 219: 264).
Despite this apparent total coercion, Dudkin does make a remark
suggesting that he may have a measure of free will even if he cannot
embody it in action. When he approaches Lippanchenko's house Dudkin twice has the thought that it is not right to kill someone so simply,
on suspicion alone and without explanation (II, 211: 259). However,
given the cognitive schema that rules over the novel, it may be that
even this ethical thought was implanted in Dudkin from the beyond.
The bronze statue's role as a symbol of apocalyptic destruction, and
Dudkin's consequent involvement in events adumbrating the apocalypse, are implied by the narrator's statement that "Everything that had
happened along with everything that was coming was merely spectral
transiences of ordeals to be endured until the last trumpet sounded" (II,
1 3 2 - 3 3 : 214). In the same passage, the narrator identifies Dudkin with
the protagonist of Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman and revaluates his
experiences, so that what may seem to be personal tragedy becomes a
necessary step toward the final transfiguration of the world: "Alexander IvanychEvgenynow understood for the first time that he
had been running in vain for a century. . . and in his wake came a rumbling without the slightest wrath . . . He was forgiven" (II, 132: 214).
This is an excellent example of the transvaluation of good and evil in
the novel as a whole.
Like Apollon Apollonovich and Nikolai, Dudkin also has visions of
Asiatics. He sees Tatars and Japanese when asleep, and a "fateful face"
on a piece of dark yellow wallpaper even while awake (1,114: 58). But
in contrast to the other two characters, Dudkin is not a passive witness, and attempts to struggle against the visitations. Moreover, the
Mongol who appears on his wall "would fix a gaze full of hatred" at him
(I, 118: 60). This antipathy may have arisen because, as Shishnarfne
mentioned, Dudkin had at first advocated summoning the Mongols
to hasten the destruction, but later he took fright at this idea (II, 115:
203).
Dudkin's unique status is also signaled by the narrator, who, shortly
after the important passages dealing with Russia's destiny, says about
him: "At this point human destinies were distinctly illuminated for
Alexander Ivanovich. He could perceive: what would be, what never
was to be . . . but he was afraid to glance into his own destiny" (I, 126:
65). Even though he has special insights into the world order, Dudkin is
of course on a lower step of awareness than the narrator. In a sense, this
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141
is confirmed by his fear of summoning the Mongols while in Helsingfors, prior to the events described in Petersburg. In other words, he was
incapable of rising to a Solovievian welcome to pan-Mongolism.
But how can one explain Dudkin's unique status, and the difference
between his involvement with the transcendent and that of the Ableukhovs? The answer may be that they are tied to, or under the dominant
influence of different stages of the apocalypse. During his visit to Nikolai, Dudkin reveals that he thinks of himself as an agent-provocateur
"in the name of a great idea; and then again not in the name of an idea,
but of something in the air . . . I can call it a general thirsting after
death" (I, 117: 60). A few lines down, he describes a certain habit of his
that may explain this remark. During times of insomnia, and, significantly, when the Mongolian face is staring balefully at him, Dudkin assumes the pose of the crucifix against a wall. This tentative association
with Christ grows later in the novel during Dudkin's meeting with Lippanchenko, when Dudkin tries to impress the latter with his credo that
"the Revolution was a hypostasis" (II, 95; 191). This formulation can be
taken to mean that the revolution is the unique essence or person of the
Godhead, an idea that was not limited to Petersburg, or even to Bely
for that matter. It foreshadows the famous appearance of Christ at the
head of the revolutionary detachment in Blok's long narrative poem
The Twelve (1918), as well as Christ's association with the Revolution
in Bely's own Christ is Risen (Khristos Voskres, 1918), written in response to Blok.
Dudkin's association with Christ may shed light on his notion that he
is acting in accordance with a general death wish, and on his former advocacy of the destruction of culture. Both are reflections of the coming
apocalypse, which in turn can be seen as a reenactment of Christ's passion and resurrection on a worldwide scale. As a result, Dudkin is spiritually closer to a later stage in Soloviev's prophecy than are the Ableukhovs. They are motivated by harbingers of the Antichrist, while
Dudkin is associated with the beginning of the victory of good over
evil. The Mongol's hatred of Dudkin may be the result of the narrow
perspective that evil has on good, especially at a time when evil is temporarily on the ascendant. This sort of interpretation is perfectly in
keeping with anthroposophy, with its frequent descriptions of the staggered development of different branches or even individual members
of the human race at the same period in cosmic time.
The friction between Dudkin and the Mongol is atypical of the role
of Asia in the novel as a whole. As many have noted, a broad range of
details shows how much the other characters and St. Petersburg itself,
as perceived by the narrator, are saturated with a pan-Asiatic influence. Sofia Petrovna wears a kimono and decorates her rooms with
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Andrei Bely
Japanese prints (I, 81-82: 39). Her husband serves in a regiment whose
honorary chief is the King of Siam (I, 87: 42-43). Lippanchenko wears
yellow and seems to have something Mongolian about him (I, 56-57:
26). An automobile with Orientals in it, or with headlights like Mongol
eyes, roars through the city (I, 126: 65). The narrator can hear the
hoofbeats of approaching Asiatic horsemen (II, 176: 239), and refers
several times to a "shaggy fur hat" from the "fields of bloodstained
Manchuria" and its wearer who circulates through the city with revolutionary talk (I, 102: 51). Finally, the Ableukhovs have Asiatic blood in
them (1,17: 3), and as Dudkin says, so do all Russians (I, 57: 27).
Under the weight of so many presages of pan-Mongolism, references
to other stages of the Solovievian apocalypse may seem lost in the novel.
But Dudkin's association with Christ is not the only oblique reference
to the Second Coming in Petersburg. An enigmatic, unnamed figure
appears to several of the major characters, including Dudkin. It is
bathed in such an atmosphere of purity, mystery, and gentleness by
the narrator, that, as many other commentators have also noted, the
reader is led to infer it may be Christ. 70
The figure appears in the novel for the first time in an indented passage. Sofia Petrovna has gone to a masked ball where she sees a "white
domino" that she takes at first to be her husband. Then both she and the
reader realize that it cannot be he, for behind the domino's mask is
"Someone, Enormous beyond Measure" (I, 219: 119). This being tells
her that he looks after mankind even though everyone denies him. Sofia Petrovna feels on the verge of understanding something of great importance and wants to throw herself at the figure's feet. But the scene
ends prosaically with the "sad and tall one" helping her into a carriage.
In addition to evoking a number of associations with the New Testament, Likhutina's encounter with the figure is a reprise of several important themes in the novel itself. The masked white domino both recalls, and acts as a counterpoint, to the red domino and mask that
Nikolai dons to terrorize Sofia Petrovna, and which is perceived by his
father and the press as a manifestation of revolution. The disguises also
recall the narrator's reference to cerebral play being a mask for the intrusion of occult forces into the human brain. Moreover, the apparent
enormity of the figure that Sofia Petrovna encounters echoes Shishnarfne's description of the enormous astral cosmos that touches on St.
Petersburg and that is capable of "throwing out" spiritual beings.
It is highly significant in terms of the novel's metaphysics that certain
aspects of the figure's appearance change depending on who perceives
it. When Nikolai leaves the same masked ball he also sees the figure.
But to him it seems to be a local policeman who angrily walks by right
in front of him. (I, 229:125). To Dudkin the "sad and tall one"seems fa-
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143
miliar also, and he recalls having heard an old woman call him "Misha"
(II, 107: 198). Even more striking is Nikolai's sensation later in the novel
when he encounters the figure again: "it seemed as if someone sad . . .
had entered his soul, and that the bright light of his eyes had begun to
pierce him" (II, 146: 220). This encounter, and the figure's metamorphoses before different characters, show Christ acting like one of the
intruding occult forces about which the narrator spoke at the end of the
first chapter. The temporary influence of Christ can be sufficiently
strong to change an individual's physical appearance. Rather than fluctuate between being "shadows" and "real," a number of personages fluctuate between "transfiguration" and "being real." Another way of putting this is that mankind (as represented by such disparate types as
Sofia Petrovna, her husband, Nikolai, "an old woman") has a potential
unity in Christ. This is the central tenet of anthroposophy, and will become Bely's main theme in Kotik Letaev.
The question that immediately arises, however, is how Christ as a
unifying principle can be reconciled with the pan-Mongolism saturating the novel. The answer again lies in Soloviev's eschatology: panMongolism is but part of a whole, and a preface to the Second Coming.
The overwhelming preponderance of manifestations of Asia over those
of Christ in the novel has the same explanation: mankind is in the grip
of harbingers of the Antichrist, who must first dominate the world before he can be defeated by Christ. Thus it is fitting that Bely should
have portrayed an alienated Christ in his novel. Since Christ will triumph only in the end of world history, it is appropriate that He should
seem to be largely forgotten until that time.
Although it is possible to understand the white domino within the
context of a Solovievian eschatology, it is most likely that Bely borrowed his specific image of Christ from anthroposophy. In a wellknown lecture from 1911, Steiner had spoken of a major recent event in
cosmic evolution that must have struck a responsive chord in Bely
namely, "the appearance of the Christ as an Etheric Being in contradistinction to the Physical Christ of Palestine." At the beginning of the
twentieth century, Christ would start becoming visible, "at first to a
small number of individuals through a form of natural clairvoyance.
Then in the course of the next three thousand years . . . to greater and
greater numbers of people." According to Steiner, the Etheric Christ
will come to comfort men, and will show his supersensible origins by
vanishing immediately after appearing. But to those before whom He
appears, Christ will seem to have been a physical man. The effect of the
Etheric Christ on the world will be to bring about a unification of the
intellectual and moral poles of man, until the positive moral tenor of
the world is so heightened that the world will be transfigured. 71
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Andrei Bely
It has become clear that neither the narrator nor the major characters
in the novel are free agents, but largely unwitting pawns in a grand cosmic design. A striking exception is Lippanchenko. Before he is murdered by Dudkin, he appears as the consummate manipulator of the
destinies of others. Bely acknowledged in his posthumously published
memoir that he had modeled Lippanchenko on the notorious double
agent Evno Fishelevich Azef, who had worked concurrently for the
Tsarist secret police and the terrorist arm of the Socialist Revolutionary
Party. (Curiously, Bely gave his agent-provocateur a surname that resembled to an uncanny degree the pseudonym Azef used while living in
Berlin, "Lipchenko"a coincidence that subsequently amazed Bely because he could not have known the pseudonym when he was working
on the novel.) 72 Like his real-life prototype, Bely's creation also serves
in the secret police at the same time that he is a member of a terrorist organization.
Lippanchenko directs his energies in the novel at arranging the assassination of Apollon Apollonovich by his son Nikolai. To this end, he
manipulates people without their knowledge and against their wishes.
For instance, he isolates Dudkin in a garret for a long time, and then
gets him to deliver the bomb to Nikolai. But Dudkin had no idea the
bomb was to be used to assassinate the senator, because Lippanchenko
had told him that Nikolai was to be given the bomb simply for safekeeping (I, 54: 25). Moreover, Lippanchenko gives Dudkin a note for
Nikolai without telling him that it contains a directive to the son to assassinate his father. Although Dudkin forgets to turn over this letter
when he delivers the bomb, it eventually reaches Nikolai through Varvara Evgrafovna, a farcical "liberated woman," and Sofia Petrovna,
who hands it to him at the ball. In the note Lippanchenko attempts to
coerce Nikolai, who, even though he had originally offered to murder
his father, expresses total revulsion with the idea in his dialogue about
this with Dudkin (II, 69:176).
In view of the high, senatorial rank of Apollon Apollonovich, and
the general instability in the land resulting from the 1905 Revolution,
Lippanchenko may be hoping for more than a mere assassination of yet
one more important personage. Even Varvara Evgrafovna, although
not privy to Lippanchenko's secret designs, understands the task Niko-
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145
lai has been assigned as one that will result in a "universal explosion" (I,
147: 77). Indeed, it is tempting to see Lippanchenko as one who is trying to cause a distinctly proto-apocalyptic explosion that will sweep
away the old order. This impression is augmented by the great tension
with which Bely surrounds the bomb, as well as by the numerous related
symbols of explosions and expanding crimson spheres with which the
novel is filled.
Lippanchenko thus appears to have something in common with
Musatov in the Second Symphony and Kudeiarov in The Silver Dove.
The resemblance is closer to the latter, and in both cases is limited only
to a characteristic that is a major preoccupation of Bely's: an individual's willful desire to have the apocalypse proceed the way he wants it
to. Musatov fits this pattern to the extent that he looks for apocalyptic
events under the promptings of his own, inner sense of cosmic time,
which tells him that the end of world history has already begun. In fact,
it had not reached the point he thought it had. Kudeiarov s misguided
theurgy is a more clear example of the same problem.
However, neither Musatov nor Kudeiarov is ultimately his own
agent. Either because of their willfulness, or for imponderable reasons
of fate, each commits an error and takes the wrong path under the influence of otherworldly forces, clearly evil ones in Kudeiarov s case.
The same seems to be true of Lippanchenko, who in the end manages to
effect only a distinctly false apocalypse.
Here again anthroposophy sheds some light on the novel. Rather
than proposing a bipolar opposition between Christ and Satan, Steiner
conceived of Christ as the perfect mediator between two opposing
spiritual tendencies in the universe that play a crucial role in its evolutiontendencies which, although not evil when in correct balance with
each other, are evil in their pure forms. One is designated Lucifer, and is
associated with a wide gamut of characteristics centering on the spirit; the
other is Ahriman, centered on matter. Man can fall into grievous error
if he goes too far in the direction of cultivating either spiritual or material qualitiesincluding his emotions and intuitions at the expense of
reason and logic, inconsistency at the expense of constancy, and art at
the expense of science. 73
Christ is called forth in Petersburg by the entire theme of apocalypse,
and actually appears on its pages in an anthroposophical, Etheric form.
The Luciferic pole of Steiner's schema seems to be somewhat underdeveloped, however, and is another instance of Bely's selective adaptation of a new influence. Only Sofia Petrovna Likhutina is sufficiently
flighty in her superficial involvement with different people and whatever is in vogue in the capital city to be under what could be termed a
disproportionately great Luciferic influence in Steinerian terms.
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Andrei Bely
Petersburg
147
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Andrei Bely
Thus far I have been principally concerned with the main vertical
axis in Petersburg: earlier in this chapter, I examined how man is tied to
a transcendent realm; and in the later parts I looked at the nature of
that realm and its one clearly visible facethe apocalypse. Now, however, I would like to turn briefly to the interconnected network of symbols and see how it produces a consistently apocalyptic vision of the
transcendent; in other words, how a great unity can be seen to underlie
the seeming chaos of symbols perceived by both the narrator and the
characters in the novel.
The boundaries between individual symbols or groups of related
symbols in Petersburg are fluid. It is invariably possible to find an instance when any given symbol merges into another. And upon rereading the novel, each symbol one encounters automatically implies all the
others. From this point of view, therefore, the world of the novel once
again appears as profoundly unified. In fact, Bely's network of symbols
in Petersburg turns out to be a perfect illustration of a central thesis in
his theory of symbolism: the absolute Symbol manifests itself in the
seemingly independent symbols that are "created" as they are perceived
by individuals.
Tracing all the interconnections among all the symbols would be too
time-consuming, but it is worth examining the links among some of the
most important ones. 7 5 The portentous equestrian statue of Peter, for
example, is tied to the theme of pan-Mongolism by the sound of the
statue's hoofbeats when it moves through the city: they echo the hoofbeats of the approaching riders from the steppes. (In a footnote, Bely
acknowledges his debt to Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman for the description of the sound.) In a passage that disappeared from the first Soviet edition of the novel in 1928, the connection between Peter and the
Mongols was suggested even more strongly. During his dream vision,
Nikolai learns that he had once been ordered by his father, the Emperor
of China, to slaughter many thousands of people. Later, Nikolai galloped into Russia with Tamerlane's horsemen and was incarnated in the
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blood of a Russian nobleman. In Russia he slaughtered many thousands once again (1916, 269: 167). This association of bloodshed with
the image of Nikolai arriving in Russia on horseback recalls the narrator's paean to the equestrian statue, and also the high cost in human
lives that the establishment of Peter's new northern capital required.
Images foreshadowing the Bronze Horseman's highly significant role
in Petersburg are scattered throughout the text, but not all of them
make overt references to the rider or his steed. One important connecting leitmotif is the symbolic phosphorescence the narrator mentions in
connection with the moon over the city. The clearest revelation of the
links between the moon, the phosphorescence, and the rider occurs at
the end of the novel when Dudkin is on his way to murder Lippanchenko. The moon becomes entangled in the branches of a bush so that
the spaces between them fill with a phosphorescent glare: "They
formed into an immense body, glowing phosphorescent, wearing a vitriol-colored cloak" (II, 211: 259). In retrospect, then, the frequent appearances of the phosphorescent moon can be seen to function as prfigurations of the statue and all it symbolizes.
Bely links the Bronze Horseman to marine Dutch imagery by building on the tradition of Peter the Great's well-known affection for Holland, where he had worked as a shipwright in his youth. An old Dutch
mariner observes the statue's gallop through the city and looks forward
to drinking with Peter and to shaking Peter's hand, which, as the narrator puts it, will turn the ship (of state?) away from the destructive forts
of Kronstadt (II, 126: 210).
The ship leitmotif recurs throughout Petersburg, with the Flying
Dutchman as probably the most striking symbol in it. The legendary
ship appears in the first indented passage in the novel, in the midst of
the narrator's description of Apollon Apollonovich's naive faith in the
solidity of phenomena. The meaning Bely ascribes to the ship, however, is opposite to the senator's material way of thinking. The intrusive typographic form of the passage thus reflects the intrusive role of
the transcendent realm in the novel as a whole, and anticipates the
scene in which cerebral play erects a map of Russia before the senator
later in the novel. Typically, however, the senator remains oblivious to
the forces that rule his world.
In Bely's conception, the Flying Dutchman is the great artificer. The
ship comes from the Baltic and German seas "in order here to erect, by
delusion, his misty lands and to give the name of islands to the wave of
onrushing clouds" (I, 30: 10). The idea that St. Petersburg is spectral
and unrealalready traditional in nineteenth-century Russian literatureis credible if the entire world of material phenomena is seen as a
translucent, and at times permeable screen projected by a spiritual re-
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Petersburg
151
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Andrei Bely
4
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections
of Early Childhood"
Kotik Letaev
Kotik Letaev (written in the course of 1915-16, first published serially
in 1917-18) is difficult to characterize generically. Following Bely's designation, the work is usually labeled a "novel," and for convenience I
will refer to it by the same term. 1 However, it represents not only a departure from the majority of long prose narratives that one normally
thinks of as "novels," but also from Bely's own practice in the Symphonies, The Silver Dove, and Petersburg.
The most important difference lies in the subject matter. Its close parallels with Bely's memoirs of his childhood make Kotik Letaev a very
thinly veiled autobiography, covering the period from ages three to
five. Indeed, Bely defends the factual accuracy of this supposed fiction
in On the Border Between Two Centuries, where he says that no other
book of his gives as straightforward "a copy" of something he had actually experienced as does Kotik Letaev. "it was not Andrei Bely who
wrote it, but Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev who naturalistically captured
what he remembered well all his life." 2 An unusual feature of the work,
however, is that it contains forays even further back in time to the moment of Bely's birth and to his prenatal existence; associated with this
are depictions of the spiritual cosmos. In this the work is obviously and
markedly different from any number of autobiographical novels of
childhood, such as Tolstoy's Childhood,
Boyhood,
Youth (1852-1856),
or Aksakov's Years of Childhood
of Bagrov-Grandson
(1858). As one
might expect, Bely could not acknowledge his occult beliefs publicly in
the Soviet Union in 1929. Thus in the memoir he attempts (unsuccessfully) to give a purely physiological motivation for the occult imagery
that fills the work. Nevertheless, his testimony provides valuable evidence for seeing his work as bridging reality and fiction.
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Andrei Bely
155
One of Bely's original intentions was for the work that became Kotik
Letaev to be a continuation of the trilogy that began with The Silver
Dove. Stylistically and formally Kotik Letaev is of a piece with the preceding works, although there are interesting new developments in the
devices Bely employs, especially with regard to narrative point of view.
Leitmotifs, rhythmicized passages, and alliteration still abound, as
they did in Petersburg. Similarly, both the narrative and the protagonist's life progress along spirals, with cyclical repetitions of Kotik's experiences looping around a teleological progression toward ultimate illumination.6 And more than in previous works, but less than in those
that would follow, Bely coins numerous neologisms in Kotik Letaev to
render his unique world view.7
Bely's involvement in anthroposophical practices, whose goal was to
transcend the limitations of the self and achieve enlightenment, was
probably the single most important stimulus for the total immersion in
autobiography that resulted in Kotik Letaev (and in his new plan to
write a vast autobiographical epic, My Life, of which Kotik Letaev was
supposed to be the beginning). This autobiographical tendency was already clearly discernible in Bely's earlier works. From the First Symphony to Petersburg it took the form of recurring first-person narrative
points of view, and repeated intrusions of, and gradual increases in actual autobiographical content. A spiritual autobiography reflecting the
author's place in the cosmos was also the implicit consequence of Bely's
conception of symbolism as he had formulated it by 1910. Nevertheless, the quantum leap in his involvement with the minutiae of his own
life might not have occurred without the emphasis that the occult science places on the adept developing a clairvoyant awareness of his role
in an evolving spiritual cosmos. The ascent to this state inevitably
becomes all important to him. Thus, although Viktor Shklovsky was
correct in signaling Bely's growing involvement with autobiography
beginning with Kotik Letaev, he was wrong to suggest that anthroposophy and autobiography are at odds in Bely's work. 8 If anything,
the anthroposophical belief that the past can be retrieved from the
cosmic, Akashic record should motivate autobiography. Moreover, in
view of the harmony between Bely's theory of symbolism and anthroposophy, it is not surprising that the anthroposophical world view underlying Kotik Letaev should be in fundamental agreement with the
metaphysical schema found in the earlier novels, especially in Petersburg.
To be sure, there are several shifts in emphasis. The disappearance of
the Solovievian theme of pan-Mongolism, with its attendant mood of
febrile apocalyptic dread, lightens the atmosphere in Kotik Letaev in
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Andrei Bely
157
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Andrei Bely
comprise the work itself. They are: (1) the triangular relationship
among the protagonist, the realm of the spirit, and the world of matter;
(2) the path one must follow to achieve "self-consciousness"; (3) the role
that an exalted being will play in Kotik's destiny; and (4) the relation of
language to reality.
Intimately connected with the first theme is the entire question of
perception and cognition, which was also central in Petersburg. And
this is the topic, or, rather, complex of ontological and epistemologica!
interrelationships, that should be discussed first.
-2-
Chinaman
159
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Andrei Bely
161
skin from a little snake) began to crawl from me; sensations separated
from skin: they disappeared under my skin: out fell blackborn \chernorodnye] lands." The last phrase brings back the mountain landscape
of the preface, said to be the byproduct of the protagonist's spiritual development. This notion is supported by his skin becoming "a corridor"
for him, while "Rooms areparts of my body; they have been cast off
by me; andthey hang over me." The narrator also describes throwing
strange buildings out of his body, including a "temple of thought" that
he solidifies as a skull. A time will come, he explains, when he will be
able to remove his skull and walk through it as through a temple (2627:16-17).
The creation of the temple of course recalls the creation of Apollon
Apollonovich's house by his cerebral play in Petersburg. The description of the skull-temple also evokes the real construction of the Goetheanum. The two intersecting spherical cupolas that formed the roof of
the original building (which no longer stands) had a cranial shape. And
Bely's descriptions in Notes of an Eccentric of a night watch in the
Goetheanum recalls the skull imagery in Kotik Letaev.1"
Another direct association between thought and its condensation
into matter comes up in a scene of Kotik redefining both himself and
the space around himself after a moment of fright:
Iam a nervous boy: and loud sounds kill me; I compress myself into a point, so that, in the peaceful silence, to draw out of the
center of my consciousness: lines, points, facets; to touch them
with my sensation; and to leave an unsteady trace among them: a
membrane; this membrane isthe wallpaper; between them
are spaces; in the spaces appear: Papa, Mama, and . . . Nanny. I
remember:
I was growing rooms; I deposited them to the left and to
the right of myself; in themI deposited myself: amid
times. (52:35-36)
At the end of this passage, as well as later in the work, when the narrative spirals back to Kotik's first moments (111: 81; 186:139), the narrator establishes a connection between his ability to generate physical
reality (including himself!) and the transcendent by saying that he
"pulsed with time . . . with the corridor, the dining room, the living
room." As subsequent passages in the novel make clear, a pulsation or
rhythm is the way in which Kotik perceives an ordering principle or energy to be flowing into him and communicating with him from the
spiritual universe out of which he descended into his fleshly being. The
"pulses" are thus analogous to the "occult forces" that the narrator-author of Petersburg said are hidden by the "mask" of "cerebral play"the
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Andrei Bely
163
all events and objects had fallen away from my thought; the actions of thought in objects, the metamorphosis of objects as I
thought about themall this had now ended.
All lies outside of me: it stirs, lives,outside of me; and it is incomprehensible.
All that was expanding, that was causing me to burst and was
becoming unmired outside of me as a wall: all had fallen apart
horribly, became separated into parts; became deadened into earth evaporating vapor in the evening over the fragrant
grasses. (150-51:112)
Despite its digressions to earlier and later periods (and eons), Kotik
Letaev is primarily about the protagonist's life between the ages of three
and five. The experience quoted above, and others that also detail Kotik's growing estrangement from creative cognition (76: 53, 96: 69), apparently occur after he has turned four (94: 68); indeed, he finds this
age to have been the turning point of his entire life: "The age of four had
cut my life in two" (128: 94). In this Bely is again following Steiner, who
taught that the child's spiritual composition undergoes a radical change
after the third year.16
Because of the spiraling narrative form of Kotik Letaev, the boundaries between different stages in the protagonist's evolution are blurred.
This is also probably due in part to the anthroposophical conception of
earlier stages in any developmental process becoming incorporated in
those that follow.
-3In addition to helping illuminate the continuity between the creativecognitive processes in Petersburg and Kotik Letaev, "On the Meaning
of Cognition" also serves to demonstrate the latter novel's dependence
on anthroposophy. Specifically, it reveals the extent to which Kotik Letaev is structured in accordance with Steiner's tripartite conception of
the individual's ascent to self-consciousness.
According to Steiner, a special form of meditation, which leads to
"sense-free thinking," is the path by which the initiate could come to a
knowledge of the "higher worlds" and of his place in them. Steiner outlined the nature of this path in Die Philosophie der Freiheit ( The Philosophy of Freedom, 1894), his first major anthroposophical work, and
returned to it repeatedly in later writings and lectures as well.
A number of passages in Kotik Letaev read like transcripts of occult
meditative experiences Bely actually had. Perhaps the most striking example is one describing a continuum between the adult narrator and his
infant self:
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Andrei Bely
165
flies about in them" (140: 104). Later Kotik recalls how Tolstoy appeared in his purview, and how
he is shattered into "Tolstoyanism" according to the laws of the
abyssal pulse; and we hear about Tolstoyans; "Tolstoyans" visit
us; but the meaningdrifts about: as metamorphoses of images;
a metamorphosis flies by like dust along the street. (144:107)
Recalling his father's mathematical notes, and his mumbling over
them, "Just so!" (Tak-s in Russian), the narrator states:
These arelittle x's, ys, z's [iksiki, igreki, zetiki], . . . little
dachshunds [taksiki]; I encountered dachshunds on the boulevard.
I thought:
the "x"'s sprout like a shoot from the little lecture notebooks: like a greening, murmuring leafletfrom the swelling bud; they stiffen as poles; and they stick out afterwards . . .
as a young man left: at the University, for Papa. (178: 133;
a similar passage appears on 97: 70)
Comparable metamorphoses occur in Kotik's memories about a Greek
vase (181: 135-136), a piano tuner and two doctors (195: 146), and
about the flow of days (254:192).
Steiner s tripartite cognitive process is supposed to permit a mature
adept to gain insight into the ultimate spiritual truths of existence. This
naturally raises the question of what relation all these instances of
imagination have to the double-narrative viewpoint out of which the
novel arises. It is a legitimate goal in anthroposophy for an adept to examine his past (including his past lives) through meditation. But what
about three-year-old Kotik, who is simply too young to do very much
consciously? Was the infant spontaneously experiencing imagination?
Or is this the adult narrator's meditative experience coloring his presentation of a childhood experience? Bely's own comments suggest that
this was indeed the case. In the letter in which he speaks of the "academic anthroposophic task" embodied in the novel, he adds that he
wanted to introduce "the consciousness of a candidate for an 'esoteric
degree' [na esoteriku]" into what he had seen of his past through meditation. And in a memoir he claimed that the "cognitive schmas" of
anthroposophy explain to him fully what he had apprehended in Kotik
Letaev by means of "trained memory." 18 Since Steiner does not anticipate meditation by children of Kotik's age, we must conclude that Bely
has again embroidered on orthodox anthroposophy in Kotik Letaev, as
he had done in Petersburg, and as he always tended to do with any
teaching he adopted.
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Andrei Bely
It is also possible, however, to understand Bely's ascription of meditative experiences to his infant self in a way that does not go against the
grain of an anthroposophical world view. Given the importance of
Haeckel's principle for both anthroposophy and Kotik Letaev (where it
is evoked often), it could be fitting for a child to experience the stages of
man's cognitive ascent to enlightenment as he develops physically. In
this way, the child would recapitulate the highest spiritual stages that
initiates could achieve. And Bely could be said to have preserved the
spirit of anthroposophy, if not the letter.
The second stage of anthroposophical cognition is "inspiration,"
which provides the initiate with "points of rest" absent from the metamorphoses of "imagination": "one learns to know the inner qualities of
beings who transform themselves . . . . and discerns a great number of
relationships between one being and another." Most relevant to Kotik
Letaev is Steiner's explanation that
observation in the world of inspiration may only be compared
with reading: and the beings in the world of inspiration act upon the
observer like the letters of an alphabet, which he must learn to
know and the interrelationships of which must unfold themselves
to him like a supersensible script.
Thus, according to Steiner, "Without cognition through inspiration the
imaginative world would remain like writing at which we stare but
which we cannot read." 19
In "On the Meaning of Cognition" Bely's description of inspiration
also involves awareness of the higher beings in the realm of "sense-free
thought," but by discerning the rhythms that link the initiate with the
higher world
we grasp the life of ideas in two ways: by means of the hierarchical life of rhythm within and outside us; what is music within us,
is voices of hierarchies outside us; the worlds of angels and archangelsare thoughts; and the life of hierarchies in our thought
and the life of our thought in the formations of the worldare a
unity, (p. 47)
In the novel, Kotik's involvement with his doll Ruprecht and the
"sound apartment" refer to this stage. It is also clearly present in Kotik's
perception of candle flames dancing in candelabra: in the resulting
"gleaming rhythms the land of rhythm would begin to beat"; "the pulse
of the rhythm of gleamings ismy own," Kotik continues, "beating in
the land of the dances of rhythm." Bely strains language nearly to the
limits of intelligibility in order to communicate what was obviously
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167
This passage and others like it raise the possibility that Dudkin's encounter with Shishnarfne in Petersburg may also have been modeled on
the second stage of anthroposophical cognition (although this is something one would have been hard pressed to infer on the basis of the earlier novel alone).
In Kotik Letaev Bely also refers to his occult investigation of the connection between his childhood and the higher worlds of spirit by the
same metaphor of "reading" that Steiner uses when speaking of inspiration. In the novel, the narrator says "Impressionsare the written records [zapisi] of Eternity" (142:106), and claims that he could have formulated a cosmogony if he had been able to tie together his childhood
notions. Later, he refers to Steiner's specific formulation directly:
the transfiguration by memory of what happened previously is in
fact reading: of the universe that is not ours, that stands behind
what happened previously; impressions of childhood years, that
is, memory, is a reading of the rhythms of the sphere, a remembering of the harmony of the sphere; it isthe music of the
sphere: of the land where
I lived before birth!
(187:140-141)
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Andrei Bely
Kotik Letaev, his most orthodox anthroposophical work, Bely is capable of poking gentle fun at "inspiration." While in the countryside by a
pond, Kotik first experiences a Steinerian fluidity of thoughts: "A tree
would branch out, leaf out. . ./ Thoughts branch out leaf out for me /
I'm thinking something: but the confusion is swarming." Then it occurs
to him that his "thought is pouring out; and it silvers before me; but
you don't know what's in it. / Maybe . . .tadpoles?" (157:117). This
is a light-hearted depiction of the aspect of "inspiration" that involves
discerning "higher beings" in the metamorphoses of "imaginative"
thoughts. In general, this kind of philosophical irony appears in all of
Bely s earlier works and consists of characters enacting perversions of
his most cherished beliefs. Kotik speculating that tadpoles may be
higher beings in his swarming thoughts should thus be understood as
Bely's emphasis on the distance between any one individual and the
ideal to which he aspiresan ideal that clearly remains untarnished if
one judges by the work as a whole.
The hallmark of the transition from imagination to inspiration can
be summarized as the change from fluidity to fixity. The shift between
the two stages is an experience Kotik has often. The narrator says at the
beginning of Chapter Two: "I began to live in the state of being, in what
has become (as I had earlier lived in becoming) . . . . much would become fixed for a moment; and thenwould flow away" (62: 43). The
widespread opposition of "swarm" (roi) and "order" (stroi) in the novel
is a reflection of the same transition: "My first moments areswarms;
and 'swarm, swarmeverything swarms' is my first philosophy; I was
swarming in swarms . . . . the wheel and the sphere are my first forms:
conswarmings in a swarm" (64: 45). Similarly, Kotik registers the impression that adults around him gradually become fixed: "Aunt Dotty
is becoming . . . . she is slowly becoming solid . . . . Solid Aunt Dotty is
becoming: Evdokiia Egorovna; sheis like Eternity" (68: 47). In this
case, the child's perception is modeled on the adept's coming to know a
higher being. The experiences of transition apply to Kotik's reaching
age four, when he begins to live "on land" rather than "in oceans," or, as
he also puts it, when the "angel of the epoch" appears out of the flow of
human time (128: 95); to Kotik's memory of piano tuning, which gives
rise to a swarm of Ancient Greek philosophical teachings that lead, in
an indented line signaling the importance of the words, to "the ideal
world of Plato" (185: 139); and even to Kotik's memory of an ornamented Christmas tree forming out of various sounds (197: 148).
The third and highest stage in anthroposophical cognition is "intuition." This involves understanding the "inner nature" of the "beings of
the higher world" that the adept has come to know during the second
stage of inspiration. To know a higher being "means to have become
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169
completely one with it," and this final stage of cognition is what "makes
possible an adequate research into repeated lives and into karma." 2 0
More specifically, the highest insight of which the clairvoyant is capable in anthroposophy is the recognition of his unity with Christ. Bely
speaks of this overtly in "On the Meaning of Cognition":
Finally in inspiration,
in the union of our thought with the universe, in the wings of this thought as in an angel, "I" fly over the
chasm separating me from the boiling of the universe; "I" unite
with the world in the unity of the divine [italics mine]: this union
is in fact intuition,
(p. 47)
This aspect of the three-step cognitive process is perhaps the most
obvious in Kotik Letaev. For example, the formation of the skull temple from thought echoes a formulation from "On the Meaning of Cognition" that is part of Bely's explanation of intuition: "The universeis
the bones of The Word" ( V s e l e n n a i a k o s t i Slov[a?]; p. 49). The scene
with the skull thus appears to be an early adumbration of the highest
level of awareness that Kotik will reach only later in his life. In fact Bely
mentions in the preface of the novel that he achieved self-consciousness
at the age of thirty-fivewhich, in allowing him to recapture his past,
makes writing the novel possible. So it is not surprising that Kotik Letaev has only foreshadowings of the protagonist's future full enlightenment. It seems fair to assume that Bely intended to trace the continuation of his path to self-consciousness in a later part of the unfinished
My Life.
In the essay, Bely links the idea of the all-creating Logos ("world historyis the uttering of words by The Word; the words of The Word
create the given world," p. 49) with Christ. This connection will appear
in the conclusion of the novel as well. (The relation of "The Word" to
"words" of course recalls that of "Symbol" to "symbols" in the essay
"The Emblematics of Meaning"as well as the Biblical Gospel of St.
John.)
Intuition finds its clearest expression in Kotik's overt and elaborate
identification with Christ in the last pages of the novel. So further discussion of imagery scattered throughout the text that is related to intuition can be left for the next section of this chapter.
It might be helpful, however, to explain first why the three different
steps of the hierarchical cognitive series should appear throughout the
text of the novel, seemingly at random. A simple explanation can be
found in Steiner's teachings that the stages in question
need not be thought of as successive experiences . . . the student. . .
may have reached only a certain degree of perfection in a preceding stage when he begins exercises that correspond to a subsequent
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Andrei Bely
stage. It may well happen, for example, that the student has only
gained a few imaginations with certainty, yet he already performs
exercises leading to inspiration, intuition. 2 1
The combination of this view with Bely's spiraling narrative formin
which he returns to earlier events at the same time that Kotik grows
olderresults in intuitive moments appearing at the beginning of the
text while imaginative ones can be found near its end. The general,
large-scale tendency in the novel, however, is from imagination to intuition, despite repeated local countercurrents.
-4In "On the Meaning of Cognition," Bely explains that achieving the
highest state of "intuition" yields the (Pauline) realization that " T am
not ,' but Divinity within me." In keeping with this insight, Bely
draws a parallel between the story of Christ on Golgotha and the
anthroposophical conception of cognition. The initiate who achieves
the highest cognitive state relives, in a way, the "Golgotha mystery,"
which is the central event in cosmic evolution according to anthroposophy. 22 The essay concludes with the statement:
"Not b u t Christ in me."
We die in Christ.
But in this death is accomplished the rending of the veil in the
Temple: our personal "I" is the veil: beyond the veil are we ourselves, arisen in the Spirit and in Truth.
Weare born in God. In Christwe die. Andwe arise in the
Holy Spirit, (p. 51)
The last sentence in the Epilogue of Kotik Letaev is nearly identical:
"In Christ we die in order to be resurrected in the Spirit" (292: 222). It is
clear, then, that Bely is making the same identification between Christ
and "intuition" in the novel as he had in the essay.
In addition to concluding a series of images in the Epilogue that portray Kotik as a cross-bearing Christ approaching Golgotha, the narrator's final words also culminate a series of references scattered throughout the text to an exalted being that accompanies all the phases of
Kotik's spiritual development. Because this is an omnipotent, benevolent guiding spirit, it brings a major change from the atmosphere in Petersburg, in which the dominant forces were evil, and the white dominomodeled on the anthroposophic Etheric Christappeared as
distinctly alienated.
Already in the Foreword of Kotik Letaev, Bely speaks of
171
that one (but whoyou don't know): andwith that very same
glance (what kindyou don't know) he will look, having cut
through the mantles of nature; andresounding in my soul: with
the immemorially familiar, most cherished, never to be forgotten
. . . (11-12: 5)
The narrator s relation to this higher entity resembles the Gnostic conception of the earthbound soul's stirring in response to a call from its
spiritual homeland. This is implied by Kotik's description of the descent of his "I" (as distinct from the Divine "I") into a physical body during the actual moment of birth. He recalls the sensation of being "terribly compressed" after having been "spread throughout the cosmos."
"But the decision has been made," he continues, "the hour of life has
struck; and releasing me from parental arms, Someone ancient stands
there behind T " (50: 34).
This exalted being resembles an entity that appears in many mythic
quest patterns and one that Steiner calls the "greater guardian of the
threshold" in anthroposophy. During spiritual exercises the initiate
who has achieved inspiration encounters this being as "an ever present
exhorter to further effort [and] . . . the ideal toward which he strives."
Eventually the adept recognizes that this guardian is Christ, and thereby gains insight into the ultimate mystery of existence.23
The exalted entity in the novel comes close to being identified with
Christ in the scene of Kotik in the skull temple (3637: 24). It is also
evoked repeatedly in the text in a more elliptical form (30: 19, 35: 2223, 48: 33, 80: 56, 105: 76, 209: 157) until it becomes associated with
the central trauma of Kotik's (and Bely's) lifehis being torn between
parents with opposing personalities. By trying to please one, young
Bely always automatically disappointed the other. As a result, he always felt guilty even though he was not at fault; and this experience
eventually led to his identification with the ultimate guiltless victim
Christ. Near the end of the novel, after describing his sensation that he
was at the intersection of the father's and mother's life lines (which inevitably evokes the image of the cross), Kotik states: "But it stood in
my soul: / 'You arenot Papa's, notMama's . . ' / 'You are
mine!'. . . "He' will come forme" (217:163). The idea that Kotik crucified belongs more properly to a divine being than to the physical world
is in keeping with anthroposophical teaching about the central role of
the "Christ impulse" in human and cosmic evolution.
Thus we again return to Christ, but by way of Kotik's experiential
role as a Christ figure, rather than through the practice of a special
form of cognition. This identification became so rooted in Bely's imagination that he continued to make it even in his official memoirs about
his childhood, which are otherwise characterized by his attempts to
adapt his past life to the requirements of Soviet ideology.24
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Andrei Bely
But the exalted being is not only Christ. Shortly before the novel
ends, the heretofore unspecified and tantalizingly familiar "he" is also
identified as Vladimir Soloviev. "It seemed," the narrator writes upon
recalling his childhood impressions of adults' conversations about the
philosopher, "I saw Vladimir Soloviev: and he isthat one (but who
you don't know)" (262:198).
Soloviev occupied a sacrosanct place in Bely s imagination since the
beginning of the century. Thus it is not surprising that Bely would elevate the image of this beloved personage to a supernatural realm (as he
had already done in the Second Symphony). The implicit identification
of Soloviev with Christ should probably be understood as Bely's way
of suggesting that the philosopher had achieved the highest level of
anthroposophical cognition (intuition), in which his individual "I" became dissolved in Christ. The incorporation of Soloviev into an anthroposophical schema is yet another instance of Bely's habitual syncretism
(and at the same time a reflection of Steiner s known admiration for Soloviev). 25
The merging of Christ and Solovievand implicitly Kotik himself,
because of his imminent crucifixionrecalls how different symbols
and symbol clusters merged in Petersburg. The little girl Sonia Dadarchenko, whom Kotik likes, and whose first name is a diminutive of Sophia (and thereby an evocation of Soloviev), becomes linked to the exalted being in the novel by the mere mention of her "violet eyes" that
"silently pass into" Kotik (228: 171). There are many other instances of
this in Kotik Letaev, and, as in the earlier work, the blurring of the
boundaries among symbols suggests a great transcendent unity underlying the world of the novel. However, since the focus in Kotik Letaev
is on the protagonist's development, the reader may expect a predictable curve of Kotik's growing enlightenment. In Petersburg, by contrast, the reader was given less guidance on what connections to make
among symbols and the direction, if any, in which they were pointing.
One important effect of Soloviev's appearance in Kotik's life is that it
induces in him "the sensation of self-thinking thoughts, rushing about
in wing-horned flocks" (260: 197). Reference to thoughts thinking
themselves first appeared in The Silver Dove. In Petersburg, cerebral
play and self-thinking thoughts grew in importance, and became the
name for the transcendent's moving into human consciousness and
constituting the world. Now, in Kotik Letaev, Bely refines this central
idea of his own world view in accordance with anthroposophy. Following Soloviev's identification with Christ in the novel, the appearance of
these thoughts in Kotik becomes associated with the attainment of the
highest, intuitive stage of cognition. This inference is supported by the
association of "self-thinking thoughts" with the image of "wing-horns"
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Andrei Bely
the previous steps that an adept would follow and that Kotik in fact experienced. Although the intermediate stage of inspiration, which precedes intuition, linked the self and all that exists outside it by means of
pulsing thought rhythms, inspiration is also characterized by a sense of
the self as an entity apart from the universe. Nonetheless, this is an advance over the first stage in anthroposophical cognitionthat of
imaginationwhere all of existence is in an undifferentiated flux. In
turn, this earliest stage is superior to any nonanthroposophical cognitive schema, which gives an entirely false picture of the world and of
man's place in it. Not unexpectedly, in this step-like progression the
highest stage of intuition leads to a total integration of the individual in
the cosmos.
As Bely also explains in "On the Meaning of Cognition," this ascending cognitive process is ultimately the reflection in the individual of the
evolution of the cosmos. The universe too will complete a tripartite development:
1) the creation of man and the world in God, 2) the falling out of
man and the world from the divine depths, 3) the unification of
man and the world in human activity that transforms the world
and returns man and the world into the Divinity, (p. 47)
Presumably the "human activity" is the active pursuit of a meditative
state that permits knowledge of the higher worlds. Thus Kotik's cognitive development is not only analogous to an adult adept's progression
to illumination, but is also a Haeckelian recapitulation of cosmic evolution.
-5With the possible exception of Petersburg, all of Bely's earlier works
are centrally concerned with quests for a metaphysical absolute. The
fact that the Princess and the Knight in the First Symphony, Musatov in
the Second, Khandrikov in the Third, Svetlova and Adam Petrovich in
the Fourth, and Darialsky in The Silver Dove are not masters of their
own lives does not detract from the impression that they are enacting
an extended search for a principle that will bring them into harmony
with the transcendent. An argument could be made that in Petersburg
Dudkin and Nikolai Apollonovich are also involved in this pursuit, the
first through his mystically colored revolutionary activity, the second
through his philosophical and then mystical investigations. But the
world in Petersburg is so changed with cosmic forces, and everyone in
the city is so thoroughly overwhelmed by them (whether they realize it
or not), that a quest in the sense of a physical or spiritual journey to the
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Andrei Bely
through clairvoyance). O n the Meaning of Cognition" described inspiration, the second meditative stage, in similar terms. Like Kotik, the
adult can have his world "enriched" with beings from this spiritual
realm (to use an expression of Steiner's). Thus memory emerges as a
means of tapping into an otherworldly dimension in which the narrator's pastthe infant's immanent experience, which in turn is based in a
cosmic pastexists eternal and unchanged.
This is, in effect, Bely's personal version of the anthroposophical
Akashic recorda permanent recording of all that ever occurred.
Steiner claimed to have derived his cosmogony from a reading of this
record and taught that properly prepared adepts could do the same. 2 8
In fact, following Steiner's likening of "inspiration" to "reading" Bely
also refers to the act of "reading" when speaking of this special operation of memory in Kotik Letaev (187: 140-141, and, similarly, 183:
137). 2 9
The function of language in apprehending reality was from the start
a fundamental concern in Bely's theory and art. Thus the metaphor of
"reading" the indelible cosmic record (which, according to Steiner, actually yields its information in the form of clairvoyant mental images)
represents a radical shift away from the claims Bely made about the reality of his own fictions in Petersburg. There the reader was asked to
accept the contention that the fictional characters were as real as the
reader's own world; in Kotik Letaev, language is repeatedly shown to
be inadequate to the task of expressing the narrator's visions. The only
ontological claim that might be made about the world of the novel is
that it constitutes a transcription of what Bely experienced, and of
what he discovered about his past by scanning the Akashic record. Indeed, the primacy of this supreme otherworldly "text" in Steiner's
teachings may have been instrumental in Bely's abandoning his views
about the absolute reality of his own writing.
Revealing conditional constructions that have a direct bearing on the
problem of language appear often in Kotik Letaev. "Thus would I
thicken with a word the unutterability of the arising of my infant life,"
the narrator remarks on the novel's first page, following an indented
paragraph in which he attempts to describe his first vague sensations of
existence. Later, when trying to capture the child's perception of adults'
conversation, the narrator comments "I would express them in approximately this way, if I could have expressed myself" (193: 144). In
these and similar instances, the verbal embodiment of experience is
clearly something that follows the experience, rather than actually being the mode of existence of that experience, as it was in Petersburg.
177
178
Andrei Bely
Chinaman
179
movement from within himself to infuse the words with meaning. This
primeval, cosmic meaning is what the adult then presumably tries to
recover through clairvoyant memory from the Akashic record. Although the point of contact with the otherworldly realm is within the
self, the fitting of eurythmie gestures to words leads not to solipsism
but to an expression of cosmic truths. As Bely said in a memoir, "The
subconscious is filled with gestures that depict the life of the spirit
world . . . A gesture is the root of the verbal tree." 31 A composition of
cosmically significant gestures is thus a true expression of the nature of
the world, while words without their underlying eurythmie significance are not. The gestures of which the narrator speaks presumably
derive from the same world of rhythm that generated the cognitive-creative impulses which, through Kotik, deposited his world around him.
This is why the narrator can say "impressions of wordsare recollections for me" (117: 86). The gestures that words evoke recall the ultimate transcendent reality of which he is trying to become aware again
through clairvoyance.
- 6 -
Kotik Letaev is the culmination of the major line in Bely s prose fiction that begins with the First Symphony, and that is marked by an
ever-deepening immersion of the individual in the realm of the spirit.
The last novels Bely wrote, beginning with The Baptized Chinaman
the putative sequel to Kotik Letaevare characterized by a sudden decrease in this metaphysical preoccupation. Ironically, this reorientation
in Bely s fiction is also prefigured in Kotik Letaevin the heart, as it
were, of his most otherworldly novel, and at a time when he was committed to the occult science.
Entire pages in Kotik Letaev consist of straightforward recollections
of childhood experiences. These are especially frequent in and after
Chapter Three, at the opening of which the narrator announces that he
is now four years oldthe age that marked the turning point in his
spiritual evolution. Neither unusual perceptions, nor specially metricized, nor otherwise poetically deformed narrative prose appears for
several paragraphs or pages at a time; these passages could easily be
part of Bely's three volumes of memoirs. Were it not for the context, the
passages alone would lead one to assume that the work at hand is a realistic one. Only an occasional leitmotif or other brief digression appears every once in a while, recalling the esoteric cosmogony that had
been established earlier, and would be developed later in the novel.
There would be nothing remarkable, of course, about straightforward recollections in a childhood autobiography. But although the
adult narrator in Kotik Letaev has explained how he lost his spontane-
180
Andrei Bely
ous contact with the otherworldly when he turned four, the narrative is
written from a double point of view, including that of an adult who has
achieved clairvoyant insight. One would expect, therefore, that the
double viewpoint should inform even passages dealing with the child's
life after the age of four. Otherwise one is left with an impression that is
antithetical to an anthroposophical world viewthat a terrestrial existence could ever be free of cosmic significance.
Most likely, the pages in question are narrative lapses in a vision of
existence that at other times caused Bely to use language in a uniquely
nonrealistic manner. This impression of inconsistency is augmented by
the fact that after interludes of simple prose, Bely always returns to the
style of his visionary passages.
Nothing quite like this had appeared in Bely's earlier works. In the
Second Symphony, for example, the sudden transitions among disparate topics in the short paragraphsthe typographical texture of the
prose itselffunctioned as an adequate reminder of the underlying
Schopenhauerian or Solovievian metaphysics, even when music, eternity, boredom, or the woman clothed with the sun were not mentioned. In The Silver Dove, the narrator's and character's dualistic perceptions were sufficiently widespread throughout the work to bring
out the occult dimension of the novel. Similarly, the symbol clusters,
tormented cityscapes and nervous narrative texture in Petersburg did
not let the reader forget for an instant that he was in a sui generis world.
The reason for this segmentation of the text into different "fields" in
Kotik Letaev may be the difficulty of the task Bely has set for himself.
He attempts to use language that presupposes certain ontological givens in order to describe a reality that is not based on those givens. This
tension can be seen to operate even on a small scale in the novel. In the
section "The Formation of Consciousness," for example, Bely begins by
saying that in the distant past "T did not exist"that there was an
"enormous gap" in the body where consciousness was to be. But at the
same time he speaks of the "seethings of delirium" that "were appearing
to me"; and adds that "warmth seethed up for me; and I was tormented"
(17-18:10). In these passages, Bely wants nothing less than to describe
an absence of self-awareness from the point of view of the unborn and
unformed infant. But this is clearly a paradoxical desire in view of the
nature of language, and it leads to the striking inconsistency of referring to oneself even when that self does not existan additional complication in an already difficult series of passages. There is, in short, an
inevitable irreconcilability between the ideas Bely wants to express and
the means available to do this. Perhaps, therefore, Bely felt the need to
lapse into simpler prose dealing with mundane reality to provide relief
through contrast, both for himself and his readers.
181
The two tendencies in Bely's prose grow out of the opposition between a conception of the self as integrated in the cosmos and one of the
self as separate from it. Behind them lies the double point of view that
operates throughout the workof the experiencing infant, and of the
recollecting adult. Bely attempts to capture the elusive experiences of
the child in highly allusive language that just skirts the edge of intelligibility. The narrator then often has to add a simple explanation from the
adult's linguistic resources to the child's impressions. For example: "the
live-flowing lightscript of lightnings iswords; and the pulsations
aremeanings" (116: 85). The narrator's interjection of "words" and
"meanings" is in effect a brief lapse from the way he normally tries to
use language to render the child's experiences. The point of these departures is of course to clarify what might otherwise be unintelligible, to
provide a small point of definite contact with the reader.
Another instance of such a small, rapid shift in perspective occurs in
the section "The Formation of Consciousness." The narrator describes
how his body "covered with consciousness boiled over," and then adds
a parenthetical comment, "bones in acids start hissing with bubbly
foam" (18: 10). The reference to this laboratory phenomenon is obviously derived from the adult's experience. And it functions not as a
metaphoric bridge between earthly and otherworldly dimensions, but
as a simple clarification of the obscure image that preceded it.
These small-scale shifts to denotative, "realistic" language echo the
longer passages that resemble official memoirs. An illustrative example
of the latter is the transition between two sections in Chapter Five. The
ending of one tells about the "memory of memory" being "rhythm in
which thingness is absent," and how "beings of other lives have now intruded into the events of my life." The next section begins as follows
however:
Papa's Nameday
Pompul stopped by rarely, showing up on Papa's nameday: on
St. Michael's Day, in November.
I subsequently recalled this day: the many-horned coat-rack
was filled with fur coats: the dining room rumbled, tightly
packed with professors and members of all kinds of societies;
someone rang every minutecame in: grey and young frockcoaters . . . (188:141)
Even if the conclusion of the preceding section with its reference to "beings of other lives" is an explanation of what came before in the novel
and not a link with what would follow, the reader still expects something quite different from Papa's Nameday. It is also surprising to read
a straightforward narrative description (albeit with Bely's unusual
182
Andrei Bely
183
184
Andrei Bely
185
-2-
186
Andrei Bely
187
ition, the highest cognitive state, allows the adept to investigate "repeated earth lives and . . . human karma." 39 The narrator seeing himself
as a Persian and his father as a Scythian (and all the other incarnations
of the father throughout the text) may thus be taken as evidence of the
tripartite anthroposophical cognitive schema still being relevant for the
narrator, albeit in a muted form when compared to Kotik Letaev. At
the same time, the spontaneous vision of a fainting child goes against
Steiner's belief that man can attain enlightenment "only through soulspirit exercises"a departure from anthroposophical orthodoxy that
also characterized Kotik Letaev.
Bely does not use amphibrachs exclusively in visionary passages.
The image of the Persian (an exemplar of an old, effete culture?) and
the Scythian (a healthy, barbaric destruction of the past?) continues to
develop until the narrator identifies himself with the Persian whose
head is being pierced by a spear thrown by the Scythian. This and related
images are interrupted by the sudden appearance of the narrator's parents, who have obviously come to his room because he has been having
a nightmare (p. 162). Even though it represents a return to reality, this
passage is also composed of amphibrachs. It differs from the visionary
passages only in that it does not contain any striking alliterations.
The general significance of the widespread amphibrachic rhythm is
probably as mute evidence of man's dependence on a spiritual cosmos.
So the narrator's comment about an accident his father had with fire
can be applied to everything in his life:
I felt that behind this event of memory, there crouched another
eventancient, ancient: in the rage of flame
there arose in memory
greater rages:
wild, Scythian ones! (p. 157)
Although the specific occult significance of Scythians and Persians is
unclear, the image of the narrator as a Persian being slain by a Scythian
does suggest a connection with Christ's torment. This possibility is confirmed later in the novel, where Bely presents an esoteric, anthroposophical version of the Old Testament in which the narrator's father appears as Abraham and the narrator himself as Isaac. The latter is of
course a well known biblical "type" for Christ. Inevitably, the narrator
identifies himself openly with Christ and says "I wanted to crucify myself" (p. 227).
The significance of Christ in The Baptized Chinaman continues to be
anthroposophical, as it had been in Kotik Letaev. In an important passage the narrator speaks of Christ in distinctly Steinerian terms as the
188
Andrei Bely
189
One should add that Veksler's analysis conforms neatly with Steiners
teachings about Ahriman and Luciferthe spirits of form and formlessness, respectivelyand Christ as the perfect mediator between the
two. Veksler states that Kotik manages to keep the opposing parental
forces in balance without succumbing to either, which is the relation
that Steiner claims is necessary with regard to Ahriman and Lucifer for
the proper evolution of mankind to occur under the influence of "the
Christ impulse." (There is a well-known anthroposophical sculpture
designed by Steiner that expresses this idea by showing Christ keeping
Ahriman and Lucifer apart.)
Because so few passages deal directly with the occult in The Baptized
Chinaman, there is little to go on in delineating the precise nature of
man's relation to the spiritual world in the work. But in addition to the
passage quoted above about the seeming compaction of the narrator's
body out of rhythm, there are other hints that suggest Bely has not
abandoned the world view that dominated his earlier works.
Here is one example: "I know: that chute which you can't overcome
in a hundred thousand years: is the spinal column; I crawled from the
worm to the gorilla, to . . . to . . . the spreading of the sphere: of my
head, on which I try to seat myself; and fall again into the antediluvian
past" (p. 168). This combines an image out of Haeckel with the image
for the mind expanding to the point of contact with the spirit realm
both of which figured prominently in Kotik Letaev.
Another particularly intriguing instance is the child-narrator's description of how a nanny of his came into being, which bears a resemblance to the way Dudkin arose before Apollon Apollonovich and
Shishnarfne appeared before Dudkin in Petersburg.
She simply appeared (very many things in life simply appear:
fleas, crumbs, motes of dust!)
and so someone breathed Henrietta Martynovna onto a mirror
for me; someone exhaled before the mirror; and having lost its reflectivity, the mirror becamea whitish mist; exhaled again: and
there sits Henrietta Martynovna. (p. 42)
In part, this passage seeks to capture the ebb and flow of the child's unstable memories of the woman. But there is also a complex connection
between perception and creation: the woman appears in a mirror
where, presumably, the child had earlier seen only himself. In Petersburg, Shishnarfne had returned to an otherworldly realm through
Dudkin's throat after becoming a two-dimensional figure on a window
190
Andrei Bely
Conclusion
192
Andrei Bely
and epic or religious arts are vast and obvious. There was also not the
same certainty among many of the Symbolists about the unities they
thought they had found. The dark communication with Nature and
what lies hidden in it that Baudelaire posited in "Correspondences," for
example, is easily counterbalanced by the undermined mythic imagery
in his "Un voyage Cythre" and his longing to escape from an inhospitable world in "La chambre double." In like manner, Blok's Solovievian
"Poems to a Beautiful Lady" gave way to his "The Stranger" and to his
cruelly self-ironizing plays. In short, the suffering embodied in Baudelaire's and Blok's works can be ascribed to the absence from their
worlds of such unifying principles as the deities that caused Odysseus'
travails, or the God whose chastisements Franois Villon, Milton, and
Avvakum took to be man's lot, or the absolute historical determinism
of Marx.
The difference between Symbolism and the great systems of belief is
also obviously one of numbers. Mallarm and his disciples in late nineteenth-century Parisian salons, like the Moscow Symbolists grouped
around the journal The Scales, were self-proclaimed prophets of a literary avant-garde who argued for esthetic articles of faith that ultimately
affected only minuscule numbers of their fellow citizens.
Bely, however, was an exception even among the Symbolists because
a belief that crossed over into certainty was the mainspring of both his
art and life. His joining the anthroposophical movement, with its extraordinarily detailed and self-assured cosmogony, is only the most
striking manifestation of this dominant feature of his mind. That is
why an approach to Bely through his beliefs can explain aspects of his
works that could otherwise be easily misconstrued.
Petersburg and the question of authorship is the clearest case in
point. If the narrator's remarks at the end of the novel's first chapter
were ironic rather than sincere, for example, the entire work would become a distinctly modern, self-conscious play of the author with the
conventions of narrative fiction, the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition, and fin-de-sicle apocalypticism and the occult. Indeed,
the work would emerge as a virtuoso performance in a void, and Bely
as a great ironist who believed only in verbal play for its own sake.
But Bely s idea of "cerebral play"when seen in the light of anthroposophy and his own theory of symbolismdenotes a conception of
authorship that is distinctly nonmodern and nonironic. It is closest to
Homer's invocation in the Odyssey, rendered by Robert Fitzgerald as
"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story." But Bely goes further, for he believed that the words "singing" in him were not only derived from a divine being, but that they were as real as the things in the
reader's world. Moreover, the implications of Bely's beliefs in Peters-
Conclusion
193
Notes
Introduction
1. The estimate of how much Belyi published is by K. Bugaeva and A. Petrovskii, "Literaturnoe nasledstvo Andreia Belogo," in Literatumoe
nasledstvo,
27-28 (Moscow: Zhurnal'no gazetnoe ob"edinenie, 1937), p. 576. The quotation is from Simon Karlinsky's review of translations of Belyi s novels The Silver Dove and Kotik Letaev, The New York Times Book Review, 27 October
1974, p. 1. Viktor Shklovskii, the well-known Formalist theoretician and critic,
stated that the "new Russian literature" of the 1920s would have been "impossible" without Belyi's earliest works: see "Ornamental'naia proza" in his O teorii
prozy (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), p. 222. Similar views were expressed by
Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Il'ia Erenburg, Evgenii Zamiatin, and
many others. The oft-quoted ranking is by Vladimir Nabokov in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 57.
2. See Belyi's contribution to the collection Kak my pishem (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo pisatelei, 1930), p. 15.
3. Pervoe svidanie is available in English: The First Encounter, trans, and introd. by Gerald Janecek; Preliminary Remarks, Notes and Comments by Nina
Berberova (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
4. Belyi's omission of Notes of an Eccentric (Zapiski chudaka, Moscow-Berlin, 1922; rpt. Lausanne: ditions l'ge d'homme, 1973) from his list, a work
that is usually linked, as was Belyi's original intention, with Kotik Letaev and
The Baptized Chinaman, suggests that he did not see it as "fiction." This confirms the impression that Notes of an Eccentric is a very thinly veiled autobiographical memoir. Belyi clearly implied this in its "Afterword" (II, 234-236),
and in the body of the text, despite his unconvincing claims to the contrary in
"Instead of a Foreword" (I, 9).
5. Belyi is also the author of an unfinished "mystery drama," a "pre-Symphony," and several minor short stories that echo themes of his major works.
The latter have been collected, translated and discussed by Ronald E. Peterson:
Andrei Belyi, Rasskazy (1904-1918; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1979,
196
Notes to Page 3
as Slavische Propylen 141); Andrei Bely, Complete Short Stories (Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1979); Andrei Bely's Short Prose, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs 11
(Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1980). Juvenile prose poems entitled
"Lyrical Fragments in Prose" that Belyi published in his first collection of poetry, Gold in Azure (Zoioto lazuri) (1904), have also been reprinted: John E.
Malmstad, "The Poetry of Andrej Belyj: A Variorum Edition," (Ph.D. diss.,
Princeton University, 1968), pp. 103-119.
6. Pochemu ia stai simvolistom i pochemu ia ne perestal im byt' vo vsekh fazakh moego ideinogo i khudozhestvennogo
razvitiia was written in 1928, but
first published only recently: Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982; the quotation is from
pp. 118-119. Trotskii's well-known, vicious attack on Belyi can be found in the
former's Literatura i revoliutsiia (Literature and Revolution, 1923).
7. Vospominaniia o Bloke (Moscow-Berlin, 1922-23; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm
Fink Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propylen 47) p. 352.
8. See Georges Nivat, "Lettres d'Andrej Belyj la famille d'Asja'," Cahiers
du Monde russe et sovitique, 18, (Jan.-June 1977), 137. Evidence of Belyi's
continuing difficulties in living and publishing in the Soviet Union can be found
in his letters to relatives and friends from 1931-1933, published by Roger Keys
as "Pis'ma Andreia Belogo k A.S. Petrovskomu i E.N. Kezel'man" in Novyi
zhurnal, 122 (1976), 151-166; and as "Pis'ma A. Belogo k E.N. Kezel'man" in
124 (1976), 163-172; Gleb Struve published several relevant documents, including Belyi's letter to Stalin asking for help in resolving his problems in surviving: "K biografii Andreia Belogo: Tri dokumenta" in 124, pp. 152-162.
9. It is possible, however, that some future investigator will decipher an encoded level of metaphysical significance in Belyi's last two novels. In her fascinating memoir of his final decade, Belyi's widow, Klavdiia N. Bugaeva, underscores the great attention he paid to his own spontaneous physical gestures,
which he understood to be involuntary responses to the promptings of the
"subconscious" (which of course meant "cosmic influences" in the context of
anthroposophy): Vospominaniia o Belom, ed., annotated and introd. by John
E. Malmstad (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1981), pp. 50-54. Belyi acknowledged this himself in Zapiski chudaka, I, 173; and in his memoir from
1929, first published in Russian as Vospominanie o Shteinere, ed. Frdric lik (Paris: La Presse libre, 1982), p. 55. In his "Instead of a Foreword" to Masks
(Moscow, 1932; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propylen 46), Belyi says that gestures express the spiritual life of his heroes (p. 11).
Moscow and Masks contain numerous descriptions of characters' gestures,
which may comprise an encoded "semiotic" system.
10. An exception is John D. Elsworth's fine book Andrey Bely: A Critical
Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), which
reached me when my own book was in press. Although differing from mine in
many respects, Elsworth's book does engage the central issue of Belyi's preoccupation with dualities.
11. Following Anna Balakian's lead, I will write "symbolism" with a capital
"S" only when referring to a specific literary school. See her The Symbolist
Movement: A Critical Appraisal (1967; rpt. New York: New York University
Press, 1977), p. 3. Belyi did not usually capitalize "symbolism," and I will follow his practice wherever appropriate.
Notes to Pages 6 - 9
197
1. The Symphonies
7. Roger J. Keys, "Andrey Bely and the Development of Russian Fiction," Essays in Poetics, 8 (April 1983), 30. Keys makes a convincing argument that
some writers not usually associated with Symbolism in Russia (Garshin, Chekhov) exhibit traits congenial with Symbolism in their works (traits which, it
should be added, recall the French Symbolist novelists of the 1880s and 1890s).
Specifically, Chekhov wrote stories in which "the fictional world is largely filtered through the prism of the main characters consciousness," a "lyrical" feature of his work that held great attraction for Belyi (pp. 36-37).
8. The full title of the work is Severnaia simfoniia (1-aia,
geroicheskaia)
(Northern Symphony. 1st Heroic). For convenience I will refer to it as the First
Symphony throughout this study. All page references will be given in the text
and are drawn from the following edition: Andrei Belyi, Sobrante
epicheskikh
poem. Kniga pervaia: I. Severnaia simfoniia (1-aia, geroicheskaia);
II. Simfoniia (2-aia, dramaticheskaia),
IV (Moscow: Pashukanis, 1917); Vozvrat. Ill
simfoniia (Moscow: Grif, 1905); Kubok metelei: Chetvertaia simfoniia (Moscow: Skorpion, 1908). All are reprinted in one volume: Chetyre simfonii, Slavische Propylen 39 (Munich:Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1971). All translations
from the Symphonies are my own.
198
Notes to Pages 1 0 - 2 0
9. For a more detailed plot summary of the First Symphony, see the study by
Anton Kovaf, Andrej Belyj: The Symphonies: (1899-1908): A Re-Evaluation
of the Aesthetic-Philosophical
Heritage (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1976), pp. 66-73.
10. Vladimir Solov'ev was influenced by a number of earlier teachings, including Gnosticism, Jakob Bhme, and Schelling. For a brief summary of Solov'ev's ideas, see K. Arsen'ev and E. Radlov, "Solov'ev (Vladimir Sergeevich),"
Entsiklopedicheskii
slovar, XXX (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz and Efron, 1900),
785-796.
11. For a concise statement of Belyi's views, see his essay "Apokalipsis
russkoi poezii" (1905), reprinted in his collection Lug zelenyi (Moscow, 1910;
rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1967), pp. 222-247.
12. Belyi reprinted "Sviashchennye tsveta" in his collection of essays Arabeski (Moscow, 1911; rpt. Munich: Fink, 1969, as Slavische Propylen 63), p.
126.
13. For a useful survey of some of the other artistic and musical influences
on the work see Kovac, Andrej Belyj, pp. 28-58.
14. See the discussion of the term by D. C. Muecke, Irony, The Critical Idiom 13 (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 67-69. In contrast to the examples of
"philosophical irony" that Muecke adduces, Belyi's point of departure is faith in
an accessible transcendent rather than belief in an indifferent universe in which
man is trapped.
15. Belyi reprinted "Formy iskusstva" in his collection of essays Simvolizm
(Moscow, 1910; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propylen 62), pp. 171-172.
16. See "Krititsizm i simvolizm," in Simvolizm, p. 29.
17. In his review of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904) Belyi spoke of
the characters being like the "strings in a general chord," which is the work as a
whole. This suggests he saw the characters as symbols created by the author; in
later reviews his attitude toward narrative works was similar. See his "Vishnevyi sad" (1904), reprinted in Arabeski, p. 403. See Also Roger Keys's discussions of these problems, cited above.
18. For a discussion of Maeterlinck's play see Anna Balakian, The Symbolist
Movement, pp. 131-134. Belyi describes Ol'ga Solov'ev's passion for Maeterlinck in Vospominania o Bloke, p. 128.
19. Balakian, Symbolist Movement, p. 63.
20. For a good discussion of the appeal and peril of abstractions in Symbolist poetry see Viktor Gofman, "Iazyk simvolistov" in Literaturnoe
nasledstvo,
27-28, (Moscow: Zhurnal'no gazetnoe ob'edinenie, 1937), pp. 82-88.
21. Nachalo veka, p. 120.
22. "Simvolizm kak miroponimanie," Arabeski, p. 228.
23. Ibid., pp. 236-237.
24. Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930; rpt. Letchworth,
Herts., England: Bradda, 1966), pp. 465-466.
25. Belyi himself acknowledges Schopenhauer's great formative influence in
his memoirs about the period when he was writing the early Symphonies: Na
rubezhe dvukh stoletii, p. 352.
Notes to Pages 2 0 - 2 5
199
26. "Formy iskusstva," Simvolizm, pp. 147-174. Similar ideas are expressed
in the essay "Simvolizm, kak miroponimanie," Arabeski, pp. 224-225.
27. "Formy iskusstva," Simvolizm, p. 156.
28. Ibid., pp. 161-162.
29. "Simvolizm, kak miroponimanie," Arabeski, p. 225.
30. Nachalo veka, pp. 120-121.
31. In addition to Pochemu ia stai simvolistom (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982), I
have in mind the memoir called Vospominaniia o Shteinere (Paris: La Presse
Libre, 1982) and the vast manuscript Istoriia stanovleniia
samosoznaiushchei
dushi, a short chapter from which was first published by Julia Crookenden in
Andrey Bely: Centenary Papers, ed. Boris Christa (Amsterdam: Hakkert,
1980), pp. 39-51. Ida Zeitchik comes to similar conclusions about Belyi's memoirs on the basis of his published legacy alone: "Andrej Belyj's Memoirs" (Ph.
D. diss., New York University, 1981). That Belyi had to adapt whatever he
published to the requirements of the censorship is clear from his remarks in a
letter from March 1932 to a close friend, A. S. Petrovksii, published by Roger
Keys, "Pis'ma Andreia Belogo k A.S. Petrovskomu i E.N. Kezel'man," Novyi
zhurnal, 122 (1976), 160, in which he refers to the volume of memoirs Nachalo
veka as having been "butchered" (zarezannyi) by the censorship.
32. For Belyi's acknowledgment that he did not know what a literary symphony was see his prefatory remarks to the Fourth Symphony, reprinted in the
volume cited in note 8 above. Belyi describes the genesis of the Symphonies in
his long letter to Ivanov-Razumnik from 1 March 1927, published by Georges
Nivat as "Andrej Belyj: Lettre autobiographique Ivanov-Razumnik" in Cahiers du Monde russe et sovitique, 15 (Jan.-June 1974), 54-55.
33. Cited by Elena Silard, vliianii prozy F. Nitsshe na ritmiku prozy A.
Belogo: 'Tak govoril Zaratustra' i Simfonii," Studia Slavica Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 19 (1973), 291.
34. Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, p. 388. For more on Belyi's attitudes toward
Wagner, and a study of "musical" characteristics in Belyi's later prose works,
see Ada Steinberg's Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982).
35. Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, pp. 465-466.
36. "Simvolizm, kak miroponimanie," Arabeski, p. 230.
37. . V. Lavrov, "lunosheskie dnevnikovye zametki Andreia Belogo," Pamiatniki kul'tury: Novye otkrytiia, Ezhegodnik 1979 (Leningrad: Nauka,
1980), p. 131.
38. "Formy iskusstva," Simvolizm, p. 161.
39. This is a feature of symbolic cognition that Feidelson (. 1 above) has
discussed with great acuity, both in theory and on the example of Melville's
Moby Dick.
40. A. P. Avramenko, "'Simfonii' Andreia Belogo" in Russkaia literatura XX
veka (dooktiabr'skii period): Sbornik 9 (Tula, 1977), pp. 57-58.
41. . V. Lavrov, "Iunesheskaia khudozhestvennaia proza Andreia Belogo," Pamiatniki kul'tury: Novye otkrytiia, Ezhegodnik 1980 (Leningrad:
Nauka, 1981), pp. 107-150, and especially pp. 113-124. Lavrov publishes in-
200
Notes to Pages 2 5 - 3 7
Notes to Pages 3 8 - 4 3
201
202
Notes to Pages 4 3 - 4 8
203
seers as "insane," a view he had formulated as early as 1901, see Lavrov, "Iunosheskie dnevnikovye zametki A. Belogo," pp. 121-122.
72. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufman, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 333.
73. "Simvolizm, kak miroponimanie," Arabeski, p. 235.
74. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 138-139.
75. For more on such borrowings, see Kovac, Andrej Belyj, pp. 200-207.
76. Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, p. 403; Nachalo veka, p. 128.
77. "Simvolizm, kak miroponimanie," Arabeski, p. 235.
78. "Sviashchennye tsveta," Arabeski, pp. 115,121.
79. Belyi's memoirs (see, for example, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, p. 181), as
well as his autobiographical novels Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman
are full of references to himself as experiencing Christ's fate, even in childhood.
This dimension of the Child/Khandrikov argues against Cioran's view that
Bely portrays only cyclical recurrence in the Third Symphony. See Samuel D.
Cioran, The Apocalyptic Symbolism of Andrej Belyj (The Hague: Mouton,
1973), p. 175.
80. For an argument in favor of seeing Khandrikov as merely insane, and his
drowning as suicide pure and simplean interpretation that goes against the
grain of everything that Belyi held dearsee Ronald E. Peterson's "Andrei Belyi's Third Symphony: Return or Demented Demise?" in Russian Literature and
Criticism: Selected Papers from the Second World Congress for Soviet and East
European Studies, ed. Evelyn Bristol (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties,
1983), pp. 167-173.
81. The full title of the work is Kubok metelei. Chetvertaia simfoniia (The
Goblet of Blizzards. The Fourth Symphony), but for convenience I will refer to
it as the Fourth Symphony throughout this study. All page references in the text
are from the Fink reprint of the Symphony's first edition, cited in note 8 above.
Pagination begins anew for the Fourth Symphony in the Fink reprint.
82. Nachalo veka, p. 9.
83. For example, "Smysl iskusstva," Simvolizm, p. 218; "Teatr i sovremennaia drama," Arabeski, p. 30.
84. "Smysl iskusstva," Simvolizm, p. 215.
85. See notes 15 and 16.
86. "Smysl iskusstva," Simvolizm, pp. 213-214.
87. "Krizis soznaniia i Genrikh Ibsen," Arabeski, p. 161. This view appears
to have been foreshadowed in Belyi's earlier essay "Apokalipsis russkoi poezii" (1905), where he wrote that "depths of consciousness rest in a universal
[vselenskii] unity," Lugzelenyi, p. 225.
88. Andrei Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo pisatelei, 1934), pp. 137-138.
89. For a discussion of sonata form in the Fourth Symphony see Kovac, pp.
267-270. A more detailed examination of musical structure is provided by Gerald Janecek, "Literature as Music: Symphonic Form in Andrei Belyi's Fourth
Symphony, " Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 8 (Winter 1974), 501-512.
90. Kovac, Andrej Belyj, pp. 229-230.
204
91. See Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 1, 20, 28, 271, 275. Gleb Struve also speaks of a resemblance between Belyi's works and those of Dujardin, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf,
although he does not specify what it is. See his "Andrei Belyi's Experiments with
Novel Technique," in Stil- und Formprobleme
in der Literatur, Vortrge des VII
Kongresses der Internationalen
Vereinigung fr moderne Sprachen und Literaturen in Heidelberg (Heidelberg: Universitts Verlag, 1959), pp. 459-467.
92. For a summary of the early influences on Belyi, see his memoir Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, which also describes his rebellion aginst the established
culture of his day.
93. For a more detailed summary of the plot, see Kovac, Andrej Belyj, pp.
231-236. It is a measure of the difficulty of simply understanding what is going
on in the Fourth Symphony that my reading of the plot differs from Kovac's in
several details. For example, Svetlova s remark to Adam Petrovich that she has
heard a lot about him (p. 90) suggests to me that he is not the student who visits
her earlier (p. 30) and whom she gently mocks, which is what Kovac believes
(p. 232). And, as the remark "she received the letter" (p. I l l ) indicates, Adam
Petrovich's letter to Svetlova before they journey North is not "imaginary," as
Kovac has it (p. 233).
94. Ibid., pp. 222-224.
95. Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, pp. 195 passim. For a concise description of
Belyi's polemic with Chulkov and the other "mystical anarchists" see A. V. Lavrov, "Neizdannye stat'i Andreia Belogo," Russkaia literatura, 4, (1980), 160165.
96. The Oxford Russian-English Dictionary (1972), p. 182.
97. "Smysl iskusstva," Simvolizm, p. 207.
98. For a discussion of Gnosticism in the Symphony, see Kovac, Andrej Belyj, pp.263-267.
99. It is noteworthy that Belyi would himself single out this sequence of
symbolic images in Nachalo veka (pp. 129-130) when speaking of the Symphonies, and stress their basis in empirical observations that he had practiced during his youth. However, in keeping with his tone in the memoir, he completely
devalues any symbolic significance of the imagery.
205
2. In general, the themes and forms of Belyi's poetry reflect those of his
prose. Thus, his turning from the experimental Symphonies to the more traditional novelistic form of The Silver Dove has a parallel in his turning from the
early, euphoric Gold in Azure (1904) to the sober, Nekrasovian, "civic" styled
verse of Ashes (1909).
3. Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930; rpt. Letchworth,
Herts., England: Bradda, 1966), p. 352; and Vospominaniia o Bloke (MoscowBerlin: 1922-23; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propylen 47), p. 214.
4. Zapiski chudaka (Moscow-Berlin: 1922; rpt. Lausanne: Editions l'age
d'homme, 1973), I, 50-52. As Belyi mentions, Solov'ev himself had seen a profound spiritual significance in the deserts spreading in the East of Russia because of poor land management; see his "Vrag s vostoka" (1892) in Sobranie sochinenii, 2nd ed. (1911-1913), V (1883-1892), 452-465.
5. Vospominaniia o Bloke, pp. 153, 688-690.
6. See Zapiski chudaka, I, 125.
7. See Samuel D. Cioran's insightful discussion of The Silver Dove for archetypal associations between evil and quaternity in his The Apocalyptic
Symbolism of Andrej Belyj (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 129.
8. "Kratkaia povest' ob antikhriste" is the final section of Solov'ev's Tri Razgovora (Three Conversations) (St. Petersburg, 1900; rpt. New York: Chekhov,
1954).
9. See Dimitri Stremooukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic Work,
trans. Elizabeth Meyendorff, ed. P. Guilbeau and H. E. MacGregor (Strasbourg: 1935; Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1979), pp. 328-331, for a discussion
of this question. There was of course a native Russian tradition for evil disguising itself as good; see, for example, such medieval works as "Brother Isaac and
the Demons" from the Kievan Crypt Monastery Paterikon in Medieval Russia's
Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, ed., trans, and introd. by Serge A. Zenkovsky
(New York: Dutton, 1963), pp. 98-102.
10. For other expressions of this idea in the context of an illuminating discussion of Symbolist attitudes toward language see Viktor Gofman, "Iazyk
simvolistov" in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 27-28, p. 60.
11. Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Pisatelei, 1934), p.
86. Moreover, the related idea of a Fire-Bird arising from ashes produced by the
grafting of Russia and the West resembles Gogol's description of how he
burned the second part of Dead Souls; see his Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends, "Fourth Letter" on Dead Souls (1846).
12. For Belyi's plans for the third novel see his letter to E. K. Medtner, (26
December 1912), cited in Peterburg, by Andrei Belyi, Literaturnye
pamiatniki,
ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), p. 515; in a letter to IvanovRazumnik (4 July 1914), Belyi speaks of the third part of the trilogy as being a
"complete 'yes' " (p. 519).
13. See the Second Symphony, p. 240. There are many other small echoes of
the Second Symphony in The Silver Dove. A light blue sky that alternates between grey-blue, grey and finally black in the Symphony (p. 129) recalls the
"blue abyss of day" in The Silver Dove. An officer who pronounces "r" as "g"
206
sounds like General Chizhikov. The device of having a song comment on the
work's action, widespread in The Silver Dove, first appears in the Second Symphony (p. 184). The leitmotif of "martins'screeches" (vizg strizhei, p. 229) also
appears in the novel as a leitmotif about spiritual yearning. The "fairytale,"
when she appears in Musatov's mind's eye, has blue eyes and red hair (p. 249),
as does Matrena. Musatov, like Dar'ial'skii, has a cane with a heavy knob (p.
253). The narrator calls a scene between Musatov and a teacher "a waking
dream" (son naiavu, p. 267), which is the title of two subchapters in The Silver
Dove.
14. Maria Carlson has identified the astrological references that appear in
connection with Schmidt and saturate the novel on various levels: " 'The
Sphinx (10) (99 Wands)': An Excursus on Applied Theurgy," paper read at the
American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
Conference, Chicago, 29 December 1982; an abstract appeared in The Andrej
Belyj Society Newsletter, 1, (1982), pp. 8 - 9 . Cioran (Apocalyptic Symbolism,
pp. 132-134) provides another discussion of astrology in the novel.
15. See Andrew Barratt's insightful article with a similar conclusion: "Mystification and Initiation in Serebrjanyj golub': Belyj, the Reader, and the Symbolist Novel," in Andrey Bely: Centenary Papers, ed. Boris Christa (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1980), 135-145.
16. John D. Elsworth, " T h e Silver Dove: An Analysis," Russian Literature, 4
(October 1976), 389.
17. See Nikolai Berdiaev's fascinating review of The Silver Dove: "Russkii
soblazn (Po povodu 'Serebrianogo golubia' A. Belogo)," Russkaia mysl', 11
(Nov. 1910), 104-115, criticizing Bely's "passivity" from the point of view of the
Orthodox Church.
18. Belyi's "Vmesto predisloviia" to Serebrianyi golub' (Moscow: Skorpion,
1910) was reprinted in the Literaturnye pamiatniki edition of Peterburg, p. 497.
19. "Iazyk simvolistov," in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 27-28, pp. 60-61.
20. This conception has been discussed at length by Charles Feidelson, Jr. in
his study Symbolism and American Literature, (1953; rpt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 44-76.
21. Reprinted in Simvolizm, (Moscow, 1910; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink
Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propylen 62), pp. 429-448.
22. Cited by John E. Malmstad from unpublished archival materials in his
notes to Klavdiia N. Bugaeva's Vospominaniia
o Belom, (Berkeley: Berkeley
Slavic Specialties, 1981), p. 359, n. 6.
23. For more on these plans, see Bugaeva and Petrovskii, in Literaturnoe
nasledstvo, 27-28, pp. 605-606.
24. See Belyi's Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow, 1934; rpt. Munich: Fink, 1969,
as Slavische Propylen 59); and Thomas R. Beyer, Jr.'s, "Belyj's Serebrjanyj golub': Gogol' in Gugolevo," Russian Language Journal, 30 (Fall 1976), 79-88.
25. See, for example, Johannes Holthusen, "Erzhler und Raum des Erzhlers in Belyjs Serebrjanyj golub'," Russian Literature, 4 (October 1976),
325-344.
26. Simon Karlinsky finds Belyi switches "from one narrative manner to another in accord with the social and educational level of the characters on whom
207
the particular chapter is centered." See his review of the Reavey translation of
The Silver Dove in The New York Times Book Review, October 27,1974, p. 2.
27. K. Bugaeva, Vospominartiia o Belom, p. 82.
28. "Gogol"' (1909), rpt. in Lug zelenyi (Moscow: 1910; rpt. New York:
Johnson Reprint Corp., 1967), pp. 93-121. See Beyer's article in note 24 for another discussion of the possible relevance of this essay for the novel.
29. "Gogol," Lug zelenyi, p. 107.
30. Ibid., pp. 106,114.
31. Zapiski chudaka, I, 63. Barratt, in Audrey Bely: Centenary Papers,
comes to similar conclusions.
3. Petersburg
1. Reference to the novel is complicated by its textual and publication history. The first complete version of Peterburg appeared in three issues of the St.
Petersburg literary almanac Sirin in 1913-14. In 1916, the three installments
were excised from unsold copies of the almanac and collated to produce the
first book edition. This edition was reprinted in the United States (Chicago:
Bradda, 1967) and in the Soviet Union by the important series Literaturnye pamiatniki, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981). A German translation, for which Bely abridged the text, was published in 1919. The second Russian edition of the novel was published in Berlin by Epokha in 1922. In it, Belyi
deleted between one quarter and one third of the 1916 text (mostly repetitive
passages), but changed very little else. Ivanov-Razumnik (pseudonym of Razumnik Vasil'evich Ivanov) has described the complex textual history of Petersburg in detail in Vershiny: Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi (Petrograd: Kolos,
1923), pp. 89-101; it is also described by L. Dolgopolov in the Literaturnye pamiatniki reprint, pp. 569-583. Ivanov-Razumnik's analysis of the differences
between the 1916 and 1922 editions (pp. 105-171) is highly debatable, and is
now superseded by Dolgopolov's comments, pp. 569-583, which contain a
more balanced analysis. A thorough study of the question still awaits its investigator. The third edition of the novel appeared in 1928 in Moscow with additional cuts totaling several pages. It is not known if Belyi himself was responsible for them. This edition was subsequently reprinted in the Soviet Union in
1935, and, after a long hiatus, again in 1978 and 1979. Belyi s stay in Berlin from
1921 to 1923 was the last opportunity he had to publish his works without the
interference of censorship, so the 1922 Berlin Epokha edition of the novel must
be considered the "author's final word." Unfortunately, however, this edition
has never been reprinted, and is a great bibliographic rarity. The 1928 Moscow
edition, however, was also reprinted in Munich in 1967 by Wilhelm Fink Verlag
(as vol. 29 of Slavische Propylen), and was for a number of years the most
readily available Russian text of the novel that is closest to the 1922 edition. For
this reason it will be cited throughout this book; all references to volume and
page will be given in the text. A page reference following an English translation, or the second page reference in a pair of references, indicates the following fine translation of the 1922 edition: Petersburg, trans., annotated and introduction by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978). Page references to the first edition of the novel will be
208
Notes to Pages 1 0 0 - 1 0 3
preceded by the indication "1916," and are drawn from the reprint (Chicago:
Bradda, 1967). Page references to the 1928 edition will be preceded by the indication "1928." All translations from the 1916 and 1928 editions are my own.
I consider the 1916 edition to be a draft of the novel; this is how Belyi also referred to it in the preface to the 1928 Moscow edition (see the Literaturnye pamiatniki reprint, pp. 498-499). Dolgopolov also provides a valuable description of Belyi's abridgment of the novel for the 1919 German translation,
supporting the view that Belyi had been unhappy with the 1916 edition from
the start (p. 576). For a useful, although overly Freudian discussion of the genesis of the novel's themes, see Magnus Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth: A
Study of Andrej Belyj's Novel Peterburg, Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 15 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1982).
2. A consideration of these features, despite their undeniable interest and
importance, will, for reasons of space, have to be omitted from the present
study. See Gerald Janecek, "Rhythm in Prose: The Special Case of Bely," in Audrey Bely: A Critical Review, ed. G. Janecek (Kentucky: The University Press
of Kentucky, 1978), pp. 86-102; and the recent study by Ada Steinberg, Word
and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), for a discussion of the alliteration in the novel. Bely's article "O
khudozhestvennoi proze," Gorn, 2-3 (1919), 55, includes several exemplary
analyses of rhythm in prose that should serve as models for investigations of
his own works.
3. Belyi's letter to Medtner (February 1913), quoted in the Literaturnye pamiatniki reprint p. 516.
4. The most important essays are in the volume Simvolizm (Moscow, 1910;
rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propylen 62). The others are Lug zelenyi, The Slavic Series, 5 (Moscow, 1910; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967); Arabeski (Moscow, 1911; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propylen 63). (By K. Bugaeva's and A.
Petrovskii's count in Literaturnoe nasledstvo 27-28 (p. 617], these three collections contain fewer than half of the essays Belyi wrote by 1910). Belyi's own
reservations can be found in his preface and notes to Simvolizm. His description of the chaotic genesis of this volume is in his third volume of memoirs:
Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo pisatelei, 1934), pp. 376379. Other general comments on his theory can be found in his second volume
of memoirs Nachalo veka (Moscow-Leningrad: 1933; rpt. Chicago: Russian
Language Specialties, 1966), pp. 113-115. Belyi's theory of symbolism has yet
to be studied in the detail it deserves. One overview is provided by Samuel
D.Cioran, The Apocalyptic Symbolism of Andrej Belyj (The Hague: Mouton,
1973), pp. 43-70. A fuller one is John Elsworth's "Andrei Bely's Theory of Symbolism," in Studies in Twentieth Century Russian Literature, ed. Christopher J.
Barnes (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976), pp. 17-45.
5. Simvolizm: in the essays "Problema kul'tury" (1909), p. 8: "Emblematika
smysla" (1909), p. 70; "Smysl iskusstva" (1907), p. 211.
6. Ibid., "Smysl iskusstva," pp. 211, 205.
7. Ibid., "Emblematika smysla," p. 71.
8. Ibid., "Lirika i eksperiment" (1909), note on p. 574.
Notes to Pages 1 0 4 - 1 0 6
209
210
N o t e s to Pages 1 0 7 - 1 1 0
how to write. All his strength really was contained in his lectures and discussions" (p. 176). As for the important question of the timing of Steiners influence on Petersburg, in a letter to Blok dated December 1912, Belyi indicates
clearly that after he became Steiner's follower he reworked the early chapters of
the novel that he had already written (letter 246, p. 305). See also Ljunggren's
study, The Dream of Rebirth, for detailed confirmation of this point.
23. See Belyi's memoir of Steiner, written in 1929, Vospominaniia
o Shteinere, ed. Frdric Kozlik (Paris: La Presse Libre, 1982), and published in German
translation as Verwandeln des Lebens: Errinerungen an Rudolf Steiner, trans,
and notes by Swetlana Geier (Basel: Zbinden Verlag, 1975; 2nd ed., 1977).
24. This is not to say that Belyi was unaware of differences between the two.
See A. V. Lavrov's publication of Belyi's early diary entries: "Iunosheskie dnevnikovye zametki Andreia Belogo," in Pamiatniki kul'tury: Novye
otkrytiia,
Ezhegodnik 1979 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980), pp. 132-133.
25. Strictly speaking, the spiritual world that is the basis of reality in anthroposophy should be characterized as "immanent" rather than "transcendent."
According to Steiner, all human beings are immersed in this world at all times.
But although Belyi shared this view, I shall continue to use "transcendent" for
both him and anthroposophy because this term comes closest to an impartial
observer's understanding of the relationship.
26. See, for example, Belyi's expectation that symbolism would become a religio-philosophical teaching ("Emblematika smysla," Simvolizm, p. 140); and
his hopes that a new theosophy would arise instead of the old (ibid., p. 505 n.
26). He also anticipated the need for mystery dramas, which Steiner both wrote
and staged ( tselesoobraznosti," Arabeski, p. 112). For specific instances of
ideas formulated by Belyi and supported by anthroposophy see the remainder
of this chapter.
27. Blok s letter to A. Remizov, cited in Aleksandr Blok-Andrei
Belyi: Perepiska, p. 328, n. 3.
28. Pochemu ia stai simvolistom i pochemu ia ne perestal im byt' vo vsekh
fazakh moego ideinogo i khudozhestvennogo
razvitiia (Ann Arbor: Ardis,
1982), pp. 127, 72-74.
29. Vospominaniia o Bloke, p. 49, and Belyi's letter to his first wife's mother,
parts of which were published by Georges Nivat, "Lettres d'Andrej Belyj la famille d' 'Asja'," Cahiers du Monde russe et sovitique, 18 (Jan.-June 1977), 144146.
30. See for example, Georgette Donchin's comment, "It is essential to realize
that the anthroposophic, occult world in Peterburg appears only as an extended horizon of Belyi's consciousness, never as a transcendental truth," in her
Introduction to the 1967 American reprint of the first edition of the novel (p.
and ff.).
31. Pochemu ia stai simvolistom, p. 94.
32. Nivat, "Lettres d'Andrej Belyj la famille d"Asja'," p. 144.
33. Letter to Ivanov-Razumnik from December 1913 in the Literaturnye
pamiatniki reprint, p. 516. In the letter Belyi also speaks of the events depicted in
the novel as a "shadowy projection" of a "spiritual provocation."
Notes to Pages 1 1 1 - 1 1 7
211
34. Johannes Holthusen, Studien zur sthetik und Poetik des Russischen
Symbolismus
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1957), p. 137, misses
the major point when he identifies "cerebral play" as being a metaphor hiding
the author's relation to the work and the characters he has created. In a more
recent study, "Belyj: Petersburg," in Der Russische Roman, ed. Bodo Zelinsky
(Dsseldorf: August Bagel, 1979), pp. 265, 425-426, Holthusen has altered his
view of "cerebral play" and conceives of it as involving the "cosmic side of life"
(p. 286). Anton Hnig, Andrej Belyjs Romane: Stil und Gestalt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1965), p. 60, believes that "cerebral play" does not require
"mysticism" to be understood, and means simply that words used in a fictional
context should not be automatically thought of as referring to things in the real
world. Elsewhere (p. 69), he equates "cerebral play" with "free association."
Georges Nivat, "Le 'Jeu Crbral,' Etude sur Ptersbourg," Ptersbourg, by Andrei Belyi, trans, by G. Nivat and J. Catteau (Lausanne: Editions l'age
d'homme, 1967), p. 339, views "cerebral play" in a way similar to mine. He
finds characters' brains are "transparent" when it comes to intrusions by "cerebral play," and that identical forces act on all the characters. L. K. Dolgopolov,
in his essay on the novel in the Literaturnye pamiatniki reprint (p. 571), also
understands "cerebral play" to be the force creating all that exists, but concludes that this aspect of the novel was strongest in an early version intended
for the publisher Nekrasov.
35. Belyi had received instruction in meditation from the bizarre occultist
A. R. Mintslova. See his brief but interesting comments about his experiences
in a letter to the writer Marietta Shaginian from 1909, published by her in Novyi mir, 6 (1973), 147.
36. Pochemu ia stai simvolistom, p. 126. Belyi also mentions the fascinating
fact he gleaned from Solov'ev's scholarship that the Gnostic Valentinus (fl. c.
135-c. 160) was the first to have spoken of the world of matter as being dependent on the spiritual changes in man: Vospominaniia o Bloke, p. 458.
37. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, (Die
Geheimwissenschaft
im Umriss, 1909), trans. Maud and Henry B. Monges, revised Lisa D. Monges
(Spring Valley, New York: Anthroposophie Press, 1972), pp. 78-79.
38. See Rudolf Steiner, The Etherisation of the Blood: The Entry of the Etheric Christ into the Evolution of the Earth, trans. Arnold Freeman and D. S.
Osmond (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1971), pp. 13-14.
39. Cited by Dolgopolov in the Literaturnye pamiatniki reprint of Petersburg, p. 561.
40. Steiner, Occult Science, pp. 295-296. Die Geheimwissenschaft
im Umriss went through at least twenty editions since its first publication in 1909. The
German text I consulted was published in Leipzig: Max Altman, 1921, pp. 359360. One of Belyi's terms may be derived from Hegel (directly or indirectly), as
suggested by the following summary of how the Hegelian Absolute functions:
"Being actualizes itself as concretely existing self-thinking
Thought [italics
mine] through the human spirit": Frederick Copleston, S. J., A History of Philosophy: Volume 7, Modern Philosophy, Part I, Fichte to Hegel (Garden City,
New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 271.
212
Notes to Pages 1 1 7 - 1 2 2
213
wife saw the characters from the novel as "more real than any reality." See K.
N. Bugaeva, Vospominania o Beom, pp. 146-147.
49. Letter to Medtner, excerpt published by Nivat in "Histoire d'une 'Tratognse' Bilyenne," p. 122.
50. See Ada Steinberg's Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely,
chapter 3, for an attempt in this direction.
51. It is an interesting note that in the article "Krugovoe dvizhenie" (1914)
Belyi used the same word, "mel'kanie," to characterize the instability of the
boundary between the worlds of matter and spirit, and spoke of the "self" as an
imaginary, fictional boundary between the two: cited by Dolgopolov in the Literaturnye pamiatniki reprint of Peterburg, p. 605.
52. Other forms of typographical arrangements in Belyi's prose await their
investigator. For Belyi's own fascinating discussion of the subject see his "Budem iskat' melodii (Predislovie k sborniku 'Posle razluki')" (1922), reprinted in
Andrei Belyi, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, Biblioteka poeta (Moscow-Leningrad:
Sovetskii pisatel', 1966), pp. 546-550.
53. Nivat "Le Jeu crbral," (p. 349) believes these are Dudkin's words. However, the tone of voice speaking in these passages and its privileged point of
view are typical only of the narrator. He is also the only one in the novel to address Russia in the second person singular "ty."
54. For more on the meaning of St. Petersburg in Russian culture, see Sidney
Monas, "Unreal City," Chicago Review, 13 (1959), 102-112; Michael Holquist,
"St. Petersburg: From Utopian City to Gnostic Universe," Virginia Quarterly
Review, 48 (1972), 537-557; Donald Fanger, "The City of Russian Modernist
Fiction," in Modernism: 1890-1930, ed. M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane (New
York: Penguin, 1976), pp. 467-480. For a discussion of the distortions Belyi
made in the actual city's geography, see Dolgopolov in the Literaturnye pamiatniki reprint pp. 608-613.
55. "It seems to me more and more," Belyi wrote to Medtner in 1903, "that
his [Nietzsche's] flight across the chasm was successful, and that the accidental
awkward move he made when he was receding from our view we took as the
finality of his madness. But he did not collapse or fall and only tripped on the
edge of the chasm as he lept across." Quoted by Nivat, "Histoire d'une 'Tratognse' Bilyenne," p. 97.
56. See, for example, Steiner, Occult Science, p. 224.
57. On Christ as "Sun Being"see ibid., pp. 215, 248. Dolgopolov reports the
archivai finding in his notes to the Moscow, 1978, 1979 reprints of the novel,
pp. 369-370. Belyi also identified Christ with the Sun as early as 1905. See excerpts from Bely's letters to Medtner in Nivat's "Histoire d'une 'Tratognse'
Bilyenne," p. 104.
58. See Aleksandr Blok-Andrei Belyi: Perepiska, pp. 264, 269.
59. See Georges Nivat, "Du 'Panmongolisme' au 'Mouvement Eurasien':
Histoire d'un thme littraire," Cahiers du Monde russe et sovitique, 7 (JulySept. 1966), 460-478, for a brief summary of the symbolic significance of Asia
in Russian literary culture during Belyi's lifetime.
60. An awareness of these two possible ways of viewing the transcendent,
one limited and human and the other divine, provides a perspective on the
forces operating in Belyi's world that preempts judgments about them as simply
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Notes to Pages 1 3 3 - 1 5 0
"good" or "evil." Nivat's claim that demonism ultimately triumphs in Petersburg (p. 354), and his disagreement with Ivanov-Razumnik that the Bronze
Horseman can be seen as a presage of Christ triumphant (p. 354, n. 1), need to
be put into a broader context.
61. See Steiner, Occult Science, chap. Ill: "Sleep and Death," especially pp.
47-54.
62. Note in the Moscow, 1978, 1979 reprints of the novel, p. 368. Dolgopolov also makes the useful point that Solov'ev's and Belyi's characters have similar names, Apollonii in the first case, Apollon in the second; and that Apollonii's characterization as "polu-aziat i poluevropeets" (half-Asian and halfEuropean) is also applicable to the senator. I should add that Belyi also speaks
of the "ledianaia ruka roka" (icy hand of fate) in discussing Ibsen's characters in
"Teatr i sovremennaia drama" (1907), Arabeski, p. 36. Moreover, a similar association of ice and evil appears in the scene preceding Ivan Karamazov's meeting with the devil (which was the model for Dudkin's encounter with Shishnarfne). When Ivan returns to his room just before the devil appears, the
narrator says "something icy suddenly touched his heart"(part IV, book 11,
chap. 8: "The Third and Final Meeting with Smerdiakov"). It is quite possible
that Solov'ev's scene was modeled on Dostoevskii's.
64. Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man, trans, by Karl E. Zimmer (Englewood, N.J.: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1959) pp. 206, 208, 227;
116-117; 136-137.
65. Ibid., p. 205, and Rudolf Steiner, Occult Signs and Symbols (originally
given as four lectures, Stuttgart, 13-16 September, 1907), trans. Sarah Kurland
and Gilbert Church (New York: Anthroposophie Press, 1972), p. 23.
66. Cosmic Memory, pp. 137, 227, 220-221.
67. Ibid., pp. 137-138.
68. In the 1916 (p. 267), 1922 (p. 166) editions, he "remembered" (vspomnil).
69. For Belyi's negative views on Nikolai's Kantian system, see his Vospominaniia o Bloke, p. 740.
70. Nivat "Le Jeu crbral" (p. 353), and Honig, Andrej Belyjs Romane (p.
64), among others, also conclude that the figure is Christ.
71. See Steiner, The Etherisation of the Blood, pp. 26-27, 30. The earliest
version of the letter that Dudkin reads to Stepka contained an overt reference
to the Etheric Christ; this and other interesting details are quoted by IvanovRazumnik, Vershiny: Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, pp. 148-149. Understanding that this is a specifically anthroposophical conception of Christ counters
Dolgopolov's contention in the Literaturnye pamiatniki reprint of Peterburg
that Christ occupies no significant place in the novel's conception (p. 621).
72. "Iz literaturnogo nasledstva Andreia Belogo," Literaturnoe
nasledstvo,
27-28, p. 454.
73. See Frdric C. Kozlik, L'Influence de l'anthroposophie,
I, pp. lv-lxii.
74. See Steiner, Occult Science, p. 213.
75. For a detailed study of leitmotifs and symbols in the novel, see Dagmar
Burkhart, "Leitmotivik und Symbolik in Andrej Belyjs Roman 'Peterburg',"
Die Welt der Slaven, 9 (Dec. 1964), 277-323.
76. Belyi's own view was that '"the period' is the sign of Pushkin's prose, 'the
semi-colon' is Tolstoi's; 'the colon' is mine; 'the dash' is the beloved sign of the
Notes to Pages 1 5 1 - 1 5 5
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216
Notes to Pages 1 5 6 - 1 7 5
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218
Notes to Pages 1 8 5 - 1 9 3
Index
220
Index
Index
221
60. One Hundred Thousand Tractors: The MTS and the Development of
Controls in Soviet Agriculture, by Robert F. Miller.
61. The Lysenko Affair, by David Joravsky.
62. Icon and Swastika: The Russian Orthodox Church under Nazi and Soviet Control, by Harvey Fireside.
63. A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev, by
Lazar Volin.
64. Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905, by Richard Pipes.
65. Nikolai Strakhov, by Linda Gerstein.
66. The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-Century
Genesis
of the "Correspondence" Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV,
by Edward L. Keenan.
67. Chernyshevskii: The Man and the Journalist, by William F. Woehrlin.
68. European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the Origins of Slavophilism, by Abbott Gleason.
69. Newton and Russia: The Early Influence, 1698-1796, by Valentin Boss.
70. Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism, by Abraham
Ascher.
71. The Service Sector in Soviet Economic Growth: A Comparative Study,
by Gur Ofer (also Harvard Economic Studies).
72. The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia
under Count Dmitry Tolstoi, by Allen Sinei.
73. Foreign Trade under Central Planning, by Franklyn D. Holzman.
74. Soviet Policy toward India: Ideology and Strategy, by Robert H. Donaldson.
75. The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861,
by Daniel Field.
76. The Dynamics of Soviet Politics, edited by Paul Cocks, Robert V. Daniels, and Nancy Whittier Heer.
77. The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory, by Jerry F. Hough.
78. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century, by Gregory L. Freeze.
79. Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of
Soviet Military Politics, by Timothy J. Colton.
80. Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944, by Richard Pipes.
81. The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802-1881, by Daniel T. Orlovsky.
82. Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary
Movement under Alexander III, by Norman M. Naimark.
83. Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction, by Vladimir E. Alexandrov.
(Some of these titles may be out of print in a given year. Write to Harvard University Press for information and ordering.)