Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9780674729643, 9780674729551

Citation preview

Andrei Bely

Russian Research Center Studies, 83

Andrei Bely The Major Symbolist Fiction

Vladimir E. Alexandrov

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England 1985

Copyright © 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Alexandra ν, Vladimir E. Andrei Bely, the major symbolist fiction. (Russian Research Center studies ; 83) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Bely, Andrey, 1880-1934—Fictional works. 2. Symbolism in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PG3453.B84Z53 1985 891.73'3 84-19760 ISBN 0-674-03646-8 (alk. paper)

To my parents, to Sybil

Acknowledgments

I take pleasure in recording my gratitude to the American Council of Learned Societies for a fellowship that allowed me to extend Harvard's generous semester-long leave for junior faculty to a full year. I am also thankful for grants from the Harvard Graduate Society and the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, which helped defray the research and typing costs. Especially warm thanks are due colleagues and friends who took time from their busy schedules to read drafts of this study: Nina Berberova, Donald Fanger, and Jurij Striedter. I have incorporated many of their valuable comments and suggestions in my book. Portions of Chapter 3 have appeared previously as articles: "Unicorn Impaling a Knight: The Transcendent and Man in Andrei Belyi's Petersburg, " Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 16 (Spring 1982), 1-44; and "Typographical Intrusion and the Transcendent in Bely's Petersburg and Sinyavsky's Lyubimov, " The Slavonic and East European Review 62 (April 1984), 161-179.

Contents

Introduction 1 The Symphonies 2 The Silver Dove

1 5 68

3 Petersburg

100

4 Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

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-

2

Andrei Bely

pointment to his readers than Moscow. Some might also object, if less strenuously, to the inclusion of The Baptized Chinaman—a 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 sense—including memoirs, criticism and theoretical works—is 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 préfigurations 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 axis—the trunk of Bely's art and life—evolves 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

3

ics." Indeed, Bely's difficult, metaphysical art was perceived as inimical to the new regime, and he was treated as a "living corpse." 6 That this should have happened is hardly surprising, for Bely himself had just published a memoir in which he spoke of Marxism as "mechanical carrion." 7 The antipathy between the man and the regime was clearly mutual. Although there is little published evidence regarding the details of Bely's relations with the authorities during the final decade of his life, it is known that the occult movement to which he belonged (anthroposophy) and its press in Moscow were banned in 1923, and that Bely's friends and wife were harassed by arrests in 1930 and 1931, even if he himself was not. 8 It is most probable, therefore, that Bely was forced to conceal his otherworldly inclinations in everything he wrote for publication in the Soviet Union after his return. And although clear traces of spiritual concerns can still be found in Moscow and Masks (which are of interest from other points of view) these are insufficiently developed to warrant inclusion in an analysis of the broad, overtly metaphysical schémas that fill his famous earlier works. 9 Much of the published criticism on Bely consists of articles dealing with isolated aspects of individual novels. As one would expect, Petersburg, his masterpiece, has received most attention; The Silver Dove and Kotik Letaev follow far behind. Although many of these studies are illuminating, they often address topics that are of less than primary importance in Bely's art. In part this may be due to the difficulty of identifying what constitutes the central spring in his works—what motivates, organizes, and controls both the choice of subject matter and the artistic means used to present it to the reader. A consideration of a significant portion of an author's entire corpus should lead to a clearer view of what is central for him. However, the few monographs on Bely that have appeared stress such topics as his biography, eschatological beliefs, and stylistic features. 1 0 No student of Bely's fictional prose would deny that these are important elements in his works. But the reason why Bely focuses on the apocalypse, bridges life and art, and loads his works with rhythms, alliterations, and neologisms is that he was a conscious Symbolist. 1 1 This is the rubric under which Bely's center must be sought. "Symbolism" was the term Bely always used for the primary concern of his art and life—the tie between man and the transcendent. Rather than being merely a literary fashion or a category of fictional devices, therefore, this was for him a radical epistemological stance: a new form of cognition, most often based in visual perception, that would accomplish nothing less than the transformation of mankind. This view and

4

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 Bely—the 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

I did not have a clear idea of what a "Symphony" in literature should be Andrei Bely

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 apocalypse—whether 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.

6

Andrei Bely

Poetic language generated in this way becomes symbolic both of the perceiver's inner experiences and those aspects of the world upon which he casts his gaze. The act of perception underlying such symbolic language is implicitly a denial of the Cartesian distinction between subject and object. It is thus a new epistemological stance—one that itself often becomes a thematic concern of the work in which it is embodied, as well as being the agent controlling the work's texture and form. 1 Such characteristics are useful in categorizing works that warrant comparison with Bely s Symphonies and the novels that grew out of them. Perhaps because of Symbolism's typical preoccupation with a superior individual's perception, cognition, and ultimate expression of insights related to the self and thereby hidden from the public eye, lyric poetry— centered as it is on the "I" of the speaker—was the preferred literary form of Symbolists from Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) to Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921). It was rare for Symbolists to write novels, especially outside of Russia. A possible reason is that the novel has traditionally been dominated by the third-person narrative point of view, and has usually included a variety of other perspectives and voices emanating from different characters. 2 These cardinal generic features create an inevitable tension between the novel and the epistemological and narrative bases of Symbolism as expressed in the lyric—a theoretical problem that has a direct bearing on Bely's Symphonies (and one that he successfully resolves only in Petersburg). The French fathers of Symbolism did write "prose poems," as Baudelaire dubbed the genre. But this form ultimately bears more resemblance to the lyric than to the narrative: it has been defined as "A composition able to have any or all features of the lyric, except that it is put on the page—though not conceived of—as prose." 3 This genre, which grew greatly in popularity throughout Europe and Russia during the latter decades of the nineteenth century, may have played a role at the very origins of Bely's fictional prose. Joris-Karl Huysmans' decadent classic Λ rebours (1884) has on occasion been spoken of as the first Symbolist novel because Des Esseintes, the protagonist, dedicates his reclusive existence to experiments with synesthesia and other sensuously and intellectually refined pastimes. Des Esseintes' creation of a domestic environment expressive of his character might be considered analogous to the verbal embodiment of the perceiver's inner state in images of the external world such as one finds in the poetry of Verlaine or Mallarmé, for example. But the "implied author" views Des Esseintes from the outside, and À rebours is narrated from the third-person point of view, which deprives the protagonist of crucial authorial or narrative support. Thus, the work can-

The Symphonies

7

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 où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; /L'homme y passe à travers des forêts 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 Schopenhauer—especially the idea that the world in which the individual exists is his own cognitive construct—such writers as Maurice Barrés, Edouard Dujardin, Rémy 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 coupés (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

8

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-siècle 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 Symbolist—one 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 Valéry 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, Mallarmé and Villiers de l'lsle-Adam had failed to formulate an adequate theory of Symbolism; Rémy de Gourmont was "rather empty"; and Jean Moréas, René Ghil, and Henri de Régnier 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

9

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-siècle 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 narrator—who seems identical to the implied author—and 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.

The First Symphony Clearly among Bely's juvenilia, the First Symphony (written in 18991900, first published in 1903) is of interest primarily because it adumbrates some of the themes, stylistic features, and devices of Bely's major novels. 8 It is basically a narrative about a spiritual quest with eschatological overtones. The mainspring of the plot is that a King sends his son on a

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

the imagination of young Symbolists of Bely's generation. For Bely, and even more so for the poet Aleksandr Blok, with whom Bely had a long and stormy friendship, a divine female persona became the central aspect of their own eschatologies. 11 Although the Princess in the First Symphony is not openly identified with either Divine Wisdom or the Eternal Feminine, she has their aura about her. More important, her story demonstrates that Bely's characteristic intertwining of individual destinies with cosmic processes—a practice that will typify his world view in all subsequent works as well—is evident from the start of his career. Specifically apocalyptic references can be discerned in the First Symphony, however, in the statements of various personages who inhabit the transcendent realm which the Knight and Princess enter in the end of the work. A certain "Iya" says: "Already He is wandering among us, like an errant little flame" (p. 117). An unspecified person also cries that "the time was drawing near . . . [and] that he will awaken them at dawn to show them the One Who Had Arrived [Iavlennogo]" (p. 119). This theme of the Second Coming is also sounded in the Symphony's Introduction, with a centaur shouting that he can see "a pink sky" and a "dawn" (p. 17). Bely reveals the eschatological significance that dawns had for him in his early essay tellingly entitled "Sacred Colors" (1903).12 As might be expected, given this subject matter, the dominant tone in the First Symphony is one of naively portentous high seriousness. The characters, the details of the setting, and the action recall a variety of works from the European fin-de-siècle, ranging from the stylized medievalism of Burne-Jones and other pre-Raphaelites, to the pregnant mystery of Maeterlinck's Symbolist dramas (albeit without the morbidity of the latter), to the Nordic atmosphere of Grieg's music (in fact Bely dedicated this work to the Norwegian composer). 13 It is worth mentioning, however, that Bely interweaves a satirical note foreshadowing the much more important and effective satire in his Second Symphony, and especially in his major works, The Silver Dove and Petersburg. Speaking of the effete heir whiling away his life in the tower while winter approaches, the narrator comments that "His nose was turning red," and then describes him darning holes in his red garment (pp. 30-31). Given the great task he had been assigned by his father, these all-too-human traits are clear indications of the son's moral failure and loss of purpose. They can thus be seen as rather primitive variants of what has been called "philosophical irony": the narrator's desire to underscore the vast distance separating the human from the divine realm. 14 These deflating strokes are not lapses in narrative tone, therefore. And although neither example is really comic, as Bely's satire will become in later works, each provides a faint whiff of the peculiar

12

Andrei Bely

juxtaposition of hieratical solemnity and almost farcical satire that typify his strongest works. This complication of narrative tone also raises implicitly the problem of "romantic irony" for Bely, of how his works—the products of a timebound individual in a material world—can give adequate expression to insights about the eternal world of spirit. The form Bely's explicit answer will take in Petersburg—an answer he approaches gradually through the Symphonies and The Silver Dove—is a complete revaluation of symbolic perception and the act of writing, which become emanations of the transcendent realm rather than being the products of an individual's efforts. - 2 -

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 symbols—the view that they are created when a "perceiver" underscores the Platonic Idea in an image—is 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

narrator is identical with the implied, or the historical author should be Bely's preferred form (as was the case with Dujardin). And, indeed, first-person viewpoints dominate his works. However, there is rarely a consistent, single voice in any given work. What one finds instead is a multiplicity of first-person narrators, with different voices and often vastly different perspectives, each of whom is capable of personal insights, or merging with a character's consciousness, or professing ignorance, and so on. This in itself is a phenomenon that needs to be explained. But what of other points of view contained within first-person narratives? Most important, how can Bely's or the implied author's symbolic perceptions, which are implicitly graced by the Absolute, be reconciled with characters in a narrative who are presented from the third-person point of view, especially when the characters are associated with metaphysical evil and, as will be the case in the Second Symphony, when they make egregiously erroneous symbolic perceptions? Are they and their perceptions symbols that the narrator-author has created? If so, it is not at all clear how they could be derived from the act of symbolic perception as Bely described it in his first essays. O r are characters' perceptions only simulations of symbolic perceptions? And are only some of the images in narratives truly symbolic, while others are not? Answers to these questions must be inferred from Bely's works themselves. His theoretical essays deal with symbolism on too abstract or general a level to shed light on these problems. And his practical criticism of specific works and authors deals too rarely with narrative prose (or from entirely different perspectives) to be of much use either. 17 Examination of Bely's fiction will show that his resolution of the tension between lyrical and narrative perspectives will take the same form as his solution for the problem of "romantic irony"—a revaluation of the ontological status of fiction and the role of the writer in producing it. However, although Bely's earlier hybrid narrative forms may be problematic from the reader's point of view—by appearing to disintegrate into two incommensurable textual fields—they do provide clear advantages for the writer by allowing him great freedom in range of voices and perspectives. Starting with the Second Symphony, Bely will make use of this freedom for didactic purposes, often reserving true symbolic perceptions for the implied author (or one of his voices) and erroneous ones (or those involving evil) for characters. In turn, this may be a reflection of Bely's view of symbolism as something that will effect the transformation of mankind (a point to which I shall return). Thus Bely's narratives can be thought of as resurrecting something like the utilitarian ethos found in many of the greatest nineteenth-century Russian novels.

14

Andrei Bely

In general, Bely's diffuse early theoretical formulations are reflected in the text of the First Symphony. There is a widespread problem with the symbols he created, however, in that they are often too abstract or too vague to communicate effectively with the reader. One category of symbolic actions and events in the Symphony follows what might be termed the "some-thing, some-one, some-where" principle. Most of the Symphony is dominated by an implied firstperson consciousness. Rather than say what or who did something, or where the event occurred, Bely attempts to create mystery, to suggest rather than define who the actor, or where the locus of the action is. (This general tactic is of course one of the distinguishing characteristics of European Symbolism, and had been canonized long before Bely. Mallarmé's well-known dictum on the subject was "suggérer, violà le rêve.") For example, at the beginning of part one, "The wind burst into the window, and something flew in with the wind, twisting the curtain" (p. 21). A few pages further on, perhaps in order to suggest the presence of hidden beings in the "material" world (beings different from the more overtly Böcklinesque ones that appear later), Bely writes: "At times, someone sad swam up to the surface of the water. Swam rhythmically, cleaving the watery dampness with wet greyness" (p. 24). Similarly, actions are sometimes glimpsed only obliquely, which places them in a more suggestive realm than the everyday three dimensions: "The goat-legged forester hobbled between the trunks, disappearing somewhere off to the side" (p. 25). A variant of this that Bely used to suggest the otherworldly source of the "murmur of Eternity" is "from somewhere in the distance" (p.90). Many other examples of this sort could be adduced from the four parts of the Symphony. In each case, the indefinite words are those components of the symbolic images that are meant to point to the transcendent, eternal or ideal realm that the perceiver (the narrator in this case) can glimpse in an aspect of the Symphony's "material" world. These recall comparable devices in such Symbolist works as Maeterlinck's play L'Intruse (1890), where the calls of birds, a flickering lamp, and a gust of wind are meant to signal the advent of the otherwise invisible death. Olga Soloviev knew the Belgian playwright's works, and, as Bely recalled in his memoirs, introduced them to him. But Bely's work has neither such a relatively clearly delineated occult cause nor such palpable "signifiers," and differs in its form and themes, of course. 18 The only instance when the reader is actually shown something of the mysterious dimension in Bely's Symphony is near the end of part four. Once the Princess and the Knight she saves have reached the

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:

otdykhali υ belykh odezhdakh

. . . kivali trevozhnym ptitsam.

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 nod—the 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

Bely's symbol for eternity is structured in a similar way: "1. Time, like a river, stretched without end, and misty Eternity was reflected in the flow of time. / 2. This was a pale woman in black" (pp. 41, 81). The difference here is that the agent and the action are now in tight proximity. But although the symbol's meanings and associations are given in the first sentence (the hackneyed simile about time and the river can hardly be considered a symbol itself), while the rather abstract image appears in the second, the symbol does not seem to have fully coalesced, and thus produces the impression of artificiality and arbitrariness. What might be termed "portentous personification" comprises another category of attempts by Bely to fill the First Symphony with symbolic significance. In this case, however, some natural phenomenon is given the behavioral traits normally associated with human beings. Like the separation of subject and verb, this device also means to suggest that sentient but occult forces operate in the "material" world. But rather than keep the agent of action hidden from view or leave the subjects of verbs ambiguous, Bely, by personifying aspects of nature, makes them into visible, but no less occult, subjects of actions in their own right. Given the generally mythological character of the Symphony and its overtly metaphysical concerns, personifications in it should not be understood as merely decorative or traditional indications of Nature's sympathy for, or similarity to man. Thus, when the heir and his wife arrive at the tower, "The morning looked at them with a gloomy gaze" (p. 26); this might be an indication that the place where the heroine-Princess will eventually be born is under a malevolent pall. This motif also appears in a different personification later, after the Princess has been born in the tower where her father had taken refuge with her mother. A wind called "Roarer" (Revun) flies over the surrounding forest "constricting the heart with a vague foreboding" (p. 30). That the possessor of the heart is not specified—it could be the narrator as well as the characters—augments the suggestiveness of the image. Here personification results from the wind having a proper name, of course, but in the First Symphony Bely rarely uses this device of capitalizing names to increase their portent. Personification of both types, however, will be used again, both more extensively and to excellent effect, in the compelling symbolic world Bely creates in The Silver Dove. Another means that Bely apparently attempted to employ in creating symbolic significance was abstraction, and a lack of specificity in the imagery of the Symphony is a major feature of the work as a whole. For example, the first five "verses"—as Bely termed these short numbered paragraphs—consist of a very generalized landscape:

The Symphonies

17

1. A large moon floated along torn clouds. 2. Here and there rose elevations covered with young birches. 3. Bald hills dotted with stumps were visible. 4. There were occasional pines that pressed against each other in a lonely cluster. 5. A strong wind blew and the trees waved long branches, (p. 13) The scene is a forlorn one and can be understood as expressing the narrator's dejection. But it is so abstract that one could see it in a variety of other ways as well. An abstraction that seems to grope for an occult meaning also appears in the description of the tower: it has a terrace with "curious" (prichudlivye) marble banisters (p. 27). Since a tower evokes a range of associations with both superior isolation and transcendence, the reader automatically imagines that the "curious" appearance of the banisters is somehow related to what the tower symbolizes. But the epithet is ultimately unsatisfying because it leaves too much to the reader's imagination. Another example, from the end of the Symphony, is the transfigured heroine's "special smile . . . just a bit sad" (p. 91). Presumably this smile is meant to echo the girl's new, semi-divine status, but this is uncertain. What makes these and other abstractions function in a symbolic fashion is that various specific associations can be attached to each: a range of examples can be imagined to illustrate each abstract rule, as it were. This device is not peculiar to Bely's early art, and has a tradition in French Symbolism. Anna Balakian has written of Verlaine's predilection for "the simplest words in the French language," which he "coupled with the most non-specific adjectives possible" precisely in order to stimulate the reader's imagination. 1 9 And Mallarmé's well-known claim that he had created "l'absente de tous bouquets" in his poetry— the Platonic Idea of flowers, rather than anything contaminated by traits derived from particular species—is a related phenomenon. The decision whether or not a given image is successful rests ultimately with each individual reader, however. But, clearly, Bely's prose in the First Symphony lacks the simple alliterative music of Verlaine's verse (which adds greatly to the effect of the poet's spare vocabulary), to say nothing of the multifarious complexities of Mallarmé's poetry. To put the matter bluntly, Bely's numerous abstractions in the Symphony are most likely instances of artistic immaturity, haste, or self-indulgence, rather than of conscious craftsmanship in the style and spirit of the great French poets. This inference is supported by the fact that Bely would start creating much more detailed and specific imagery immediately after the First Symphony, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. 20

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 works—the 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

Nietzsche's proclamation of the coming "overman." In his memoir of the period 1899 to 1901, when he was working on his early Symphonies, Bely recalls that Thus Spoke Zarathustra was his "handbook," and that he was completely captivated by Nietzsche's literary style and personality. 24 In practice, the key element in Bely's fictional prose that serves as the actual bridge between art and life is the first-person narrator. This is an inevitable outgrowth of Bely's theory of symbolism, as I suggested above. And although the most dramatic claims by the narrator about the nature of his role will appear in Petersburg, several of these are already foreshadowed in a primitive form in the First Symphony. It is noteworthy that the Symphony begins with a first-person Introduction. The speaker in these four pages makes a series of rather cryptic statements outlining an emotional curve going from dejection to apocalyptic ecstasy: he begins by speaking of his desire for oblivion and his feeling of worthlessness, and ends with a description of a centaur who rushes by crying about the "rosy sky" of a sunrise that can be seen from a hill (p. 17). In between, the narrator describes a giant who is crushed by the clouds he used to carry. This movement from despair to hope in the Introduction also characterizes the general shape of the emotional curve in the Symphony's four parts, establishing a parallel between the first-person narrator's own experiences and those of his characters. After the giant perishes, the narrator says, using the suggestive subjectless verb form, "And when I cried and sobbed about the crushed giant, wiping away my tears with my fists, [they] whispered to me on a windy night: T h e s e are dreams . . . Only dreams' . . . " (p. 16). O n the Symphony's last page, however, the heroine and her Knight, who have been reborn into a supernatural realm, awaken and "see that their dream was not a dream, because He [presumably, God] . . . was whispering to them all that they saw in the dream" (p. 121). The connection between this statement and what the narrator hears from the unspecified parties in the Introduction is suggested in the Symphony's second part. The Knight is wending his way through a forest, hearing requests "that the dream of life pass, and that we [italics mine] awaken from the dream" (p. 54). Later the Knight sees the heroine in her tower extending her arms toward the sun and asking, the narrator tells us, "that the dream of this life pass, and that we awaken from the dream" (p. 55; a similar statement appears on p. 42). The implication here is that the narrator is including himself in two statements that characterize as a dream a lower level of reality in the Symphony. Thus, the narrator's world in the Introduction may be considered as continuous with the "fictional" world of the characters. Even more intriguing is that the narrator's world, like that of the characters, is somehow an emanation of a

20

Andrei Bely

transcendent realm—which is the implication of the statement at the end of the Symphony that God "whispers" the world in which human beings find themselves. The significance this has for the tension between the "lyrical" narrators symbolic perceptions on the one hand, and the perceptions and actions of characters in third-person passages on the other is that both sets may thus be reconciled by being understood as manifestations of a higher, cosmic unity acting through the writer. This possibility has a direct bearing on the metaliterary theme of fictionality that is also broached, however tentatively, in the First Symphony. In the first part, the narrator says that a "stooping colossus" is "only a story" (p. 36), and repeats this later (p. 94). Elsewhere in the Symphony, however, a giant insists to the Knight that he "is not a story" but a giant (p. 83). These examples represent two heterogeneous points of view that can nevertheless be reconciled with each other as well as with the unusual conception of dreams discussed above. The difference is between the superior divine point of view—that of the omnipotent creator, and the limited human perspective—that of his dependent creature. It is not that dream and reality, or fiction and reality are confused in the Symphony, but that dreams and fictions are also real. This anticipates the alternation of characters and street crowds in Petersburg between being "shadows" in one scene and not the next. The ontological weight that fiction acquires in a schema such as this is also implicit in the unusual form—both structural and typographical—that the Symphony has, as well as in the generic designation Bely gave it. The key figure here is Schopenhauer. All of Bely s earliest theoretical essays on symbolism, which he reprinted in 1910 and 1911, pay homage to Schopenhauer, even though Bely quickly abandoned purely Schopenhauerian metaphysics and esthetics in favor of syncretic beliefs.25 In his first essay, "The Forms of Art," for example, Bely follows Schopenhauer in ranking all the arts in terms of their distance or proximity to music, which is understood as a pure expression of Will—the Absolute in Schopenhauerian metaphysics. Thus, architecture is the least perfect art, while symphonic music is the most perfect; and poetry that aspires to music is the most perfect of the verbal arts. 26 Bely's thinking was always profoundly teleological, and he hypothesized that in the future all the temporal as opposed to spatial arts, including literature of course, would strive to approach music even more closely.27 This was undoubtedly what he tried to achieve himself in his Symphonies. The special distinction of poetry in Bely's Schopenhauerian system is that it is the form of art linking time and space. And since

The Symphonies

21

causality plays a major role in poetry as well—thus including the third of Kant's categories in its purview—Bely concludes that its "subject matter" (predmet izobrazheniia) is not one or another spatial or temporal feature of reality, but reality in its entirety.28 This is the reality of course, that serves as the phenomenal stuff an artist uses to express the Eternal or Platonic Ideas. "Music," as Bely put it, paraphrasing Schopenhauer, "is a window through which charming floods of Eternity flow into us and magic gushes."29 Thus poetry, a term that Bely must have applied to his Symphonies since they aspire to music, is not so much a signifier of the transcendent, as a direct if imperfect expression of the Will, or Absolute that is seen in phenomena. This view obviously tends to erase the traditional distinction between fiction and reality. Bely's description of how he actually went about writing the First Symphony suggests that he saw his words as having an almost tangible physicality. "A table is not enough for me," Bely wrote, reconstructing his frame of mind: I could work only in the open air; both my eyes and my muscles participate in the work; I stamp out and shout out my rhythms in the fields with waves of my arms . . . It's not enough for me to hear: in this period I must carry over what I hear into a gait; I discover for myself that there are muscular impressions [predstavleniia] and non-muscular ones; the influence of bodily movements on the architectonics of the phrase is the America I discovered in my youth. 30 Bely wrote this memoir in 1930-1932, at a time when, judging by comments scattered throughout it, he had to defend himself against increasing hostility from the Soviet politico-literary establishment. His reservations and réévaluations of the past are as painful to read as they are understandable. They also justify a careful reading between the lines, however, because it is known from the manuscripts Bely wrote "for the desk drawer" in the late 1920s and early 1930s that during most of his Soviet period he falsified and kept hidden a deep involvement in spiritual, and specifically anthroposophical beliefs. 31 Thus the mention of the close physical connection between sound and gesture, when considered in the light of Bely's essays from 1902 and 1903, suggests his private notion that his texts were perhaps divinely inspired, and that his works thus acquired a mode of being more substantial than that of mere "fictions." It would be erroneous to insist on this point too much with regard to any one of the Symphonies. But since Bely will make the remarkable claim in Petersburg that literary fictions are as real as the reader's own world, it seems worthwhile to note an early adumbration

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 Symphonies—their most striking formal characteristic—a 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 superficially—mainly 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 typographical form of the passages also serves to underscore the horizontal component in a page of text. Since the paragraphs are numbered, the reader is confronted with an interrupted sequentiality that is different from the way prose usually reads. This may be the consequence of Bely's attempt to bring into practice an early theoretical formulation of his that is also based on Schopenhauer's view of poetry as pivotal between spatial and temporal arts—namely, that an essential part of poetry is "the depiction of the sequential change [smena] in representations [predstavlenii]."3' The horizontal layering of the text thus may illustrate the alternation of discrete images, which would seem to be an inevitable characteristic of symbolic perception in general: the subject's sense of self is lost during the act of perceiving a higher order of reality in a phenomenon, and if the perceiver is to continue to function as a human being, he must be able to withdraw from deep symbolic perceptions, which brings them to a close. 39 In any event, Bely's early concern with the typographical layout of the First Symphony's text foreshadows his much more elaborate typographical devices in Petersburg and other later works, in which the arrangement of the text on the page is actually made into a visual representation of the author's metaphysical symbolism. A manifestation of a musical principle of organization can also be found on the smallest scale of the Symphony—that of the individual word. A.P. Avramenko points out that Bely attempts to imitate the widespread musical device of structuring a work around one dominant note by repeating the same word. Thus, in the fourth part of the Symphony the sacral color white appears in numerous contexts: the "white breasts of birds," "white" garments, "white" children, sighs, mysteries, and so on. But the fact that the word appears some two hundred times in the space of a dozen pages undermines its expressiveness. 40 -5It is also possible that the concepts of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner fell on ground that had already been prepared. In his recent study of Bely's earliest, and heretofore unpublished works, including the so-called "Pre-Symphony," the noted Soviet scholar of Bely Α. V. Lavrov suggests that a series of "lyrical fragments" was the "formal point of departure" (iskhodnaia forma) of all of Bely's prose genres. Some of them had been written with musical analogies in mind, and after being reworked were incorporated into Symphonies; the Introduction to the First Symphony is an example. Thus, Lavrov argues, the Symphonies developed inevitably out of an accretion of fragments (a conclusion supported by Bely's own remark about "storyless" scenes out of which the Symphonies grew). In turn, the form of these fragments was a spontaneous outgrowth of Bely's experimentation with

The Symphonies

25

"symbolic perceptions." In his earliest memoir, On the Border of Two Centuries, Bely had described how he tried to teach himself to see "Platonic Ideas" in nature, and how the "style of the lines" he wrote down developed directly from the "style of the perception." The form that resulted was entirely unique, Bely insisted in the memoir, even though he had not thought about form but had concentrated on experimenting with actual perceptions. Lavrov takes Bely at his word and concludes that Bely's symbolic world view, subsequent theorizing, and all his belletristic works developed more out of such early experiences than as a consequence of his first contacts with the new "decadent" art and ideas appearing in Russia. 4 1 It should be noted, however, that the fragments Lavrov discusses (several of which Bely wrote as early as 1897 and 1898), as well as the seven "Lyrical Fragments in Prose" that Bely selected from among these earlier efforts and reworked for publication in his first collection of poetry Gold in Azure (1904), bear a resemblance not only to Bely's own Symphonies but to several examples of nineteenth-century "prose poetry," including that of French Symbolism, thus suggesting a link between the two. Avramenko has pointed out the connections between the subjects of the published "Fragments" and the themes that appear in the First Symphony. These include black magic and terror, the struggle between good and evil, and salvation through the agency of an incorporeal force. A preoccupation with mood rather than plot, and indirect suggestion rather than denotation also characterizes both the "Fragments" and the Symphonies. And like the Symphonies, the "Fragments" are broken up into short paragraphs (which, in one instance, are numbered like the "verses" in the first two Symphonies). 4 2 In their dimension, themes, forms, and typographical arrangements Bely's various fragments and "Lyrical Fragments in Prose" recall, to differing degrees, such widely known assemblages of "prose poems" as Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose (1869), Rimbaud's Les Illuminations (1886), and Mallarmé's "Poëmes en prose" (1864-1887). Bely's fragments also resemble a series of prose poems entitled Senilia, Poems in Prose that Turgenev wrote in his old age (specifically, "The Old Woman," "The End of the World," and "The Insect," among others), which, as their generic designation suggests, most likely derived their form from Baudelaire. Bely could easily have been introduced to examples of a genre that was popular at the time in the home of Mikhail and Olga Soloviev; there, while still an adolescent, he experienced several of the most important formative influences of his life. His own reminiscences confirm this inference, and have the additional value of pointing to two specific writers whom he apparently tried to imitate in his "fragments": in an autobiographical letter from 1927 he speaks of his "poems

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 Mallarmé] 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

4. Low born intellectuals [raznochintsy] exhausted by the heat, and suspicious city folk [meshchane] ran down the sidewalks. 5. All were pale, and above all lowered the light blue, grey-blue firmament, first grey then black, full of musical boredom, eternal boredom, with a sun-eye in the middle. 1. A poet was writing a poem about love, but experienced difficulty in choosing rhythms, but made an inkspot, but, turning his eyes toward the window, became frightened of the celestial boredom. 1. Over a cup of tea, two men argued about great and insignificant people. Their cracked voices had become hoarse from arguing. 3. During those days and hours documents and memoranda were being prepared in offices, while a rooster led chickens around a little paved courtyard. 4. There were two grey guinea-fowls in the little courtyard as well. 5. A talented artist depicted a "miracle" on a large canvas, while twenty skinned carcasses hung in the butcher shop. (pp. 129131) This cascade of vignettes has two interrelated elements in common. The more obvious one is that all surface aspects of the city are unattractive: ugliness and mechanical repetitiveness—indeed, the seeming pointlessness of existence—characterize the stuff of everyday life that lies in the narrator's purview. The second element underlies the first, and implies the existence of a transcendent dimension in the world—a dimension that, in fact, transforms the disparate elements of tedious everyday life into symbols. The transcendent underpinning of the world Bely has created is signaled in the passages cited above by the narrator's reference to "musical . . . eternal boredom." These three words form a dominant leitmotif throughout the Second Symphony's first part. Shortly after the passages cited, the narrator hears "mournful and stern songs of great Eternity" coming from the sky; "And," he continues, "these songs were like musical scales. Scales from an invisible world. Eternally the same and the same" (pp. 131-132). Similar references to music, eternity, and a grinding repetitiveness appear later both singly and together in different contexts (pp. 138, 147,153,164,171, 182). The impression that these three linked ideas may be the distinguishing features of a coherent world view is reinforced by their being the key concepts of Schopenhauer's philosophy. References to musical sounds coming from the sky (which, significantly, only the narrator

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 darkly—principally by the narrator in the first part, and then by several characters and the narrator in the later parts—are 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-

Put abstractly, the nature of the connection between man's physical world and the transcendent is that man is the largely unwitting agent of otherworldly forces—a puppet dancing on cosmic strings as it were. And although Schopenhauerian metaphysics disappears from the Symphony after the first part, this deterministic relationship still persists in the other three. The structure of the relationship in the first part reappears in different guises throughout the Symphony. On occasion, the narrator depicts the unity behind diversity with satirical intent. An "aristocratic little old man" has among his guests "conservatives, liberals and Marxists," all of whom are fond of him. "The kindly little old man with the medal on his chest patted everyone on the back, and said 'Yes, yes, of course'" (pp. 161-162). Irony at the expense of the facile grace and harmony that typify the old man's reception colors the rest of the description as well. A somewhat more playful instance of unity behind diversity is this description of the city asleep:

30

Andrei Bely

1. At night everyone slept. They slept in basements. They slept in attics. They slept in the house of the aristocratic little old man. 2. Some slept hideously contorted. Some—with their mouths wide open. Some snored. Some seemed dead. 3. All slept. 4. They slept also in a ward for the mentally ill. They slept on equal rights with those who were well. An additional point here is that this sequence of numbered short paragraphs follows one in which a grey-haired elder sadly surveys the city and quietly comments "My God, my God!" (pp. 176-177). His sense of despair, which foreshadows the Solovievian apocalyptic theme that comes later, is clearly not shared by the city's sleeping populace. Thus the narrator's description of the city's diverse inhabitants temporarily united in sleep is an ironic comment on their spiritual blindness—an effect achieved through juxtaposition with the elder's despairing comment. A somewhat more positive variant of the structural paradigm established in the first part involves church services in the city: 1. And while Father John conducted the service, in the neighboring church Father Damian did the same thing. 2. Services were being conducted in all the churches; they were saying the same holy words, but with different voices. 3. Without exception, the priests were all in gold brocade; some were grey, some were fat, others were good-looking, many were hideous, (p. 219) In a different guise, this relationship of earthly events to an otherworldly motive force recurs in a leitmotif in part three: "The little peasants and horses were different, but their activity was the same [deistvie odno]" (pp. 237, 238, 239). Hinting at the deeper significance of this observation—that occult causes underlie everyday human actions such as plowing—the narrator comments, following the first appearance of the motif, that while an ordinary observer would not have noticed anything special in this fact, a more perspicacious one would have. At the same time that numerous small-scale variants of this structural relationship pepper the Second Symphony, the bulk of parts two through four consists of one large-scale version. I have in mind the story of Sergei Musatov and the various other mystics who are the butts of Bely's parody, and their foil—the figure of the deceased Vladimir Soloviev and those who are allied with him. All these characters are filled with and motivated by an anticipation of the End. But they differ in

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 drawn—is 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

"unified spirit" (vseedinogo dukha). And faith in the appearance of a new unified personality, capable of reconciling science, philosophy, and religion, Bely sees as congruent with Soloviev's teaching about Godmanhood. 4 7 This infinitely more optimistic, ideologically oriented complex of ideas colors the second, third, and fourth parts of the Symphony. The transition from the ugly world of the first part to the subsequent parts may be seen as a reflection of the dialectical change in world views experienced by those who, like Bely, reevaluated their positions toward Schopenhauer. The diachronic axis in the Second Symphony can thus be said to contain an extraliterary dimension drawn from the recent history of Western culture. That Bely himself experienced such a shift in tastes is also amply illustrated in his memoirs, 4 8 all of which militates against (but does not preclude) the temptation to see part one simply as a wide-angle survey of a city teeming with stories, and the rest of the Symphony as a sudden narrowing of the focus onto a few individual figures. A final possibility should also be mentioned. Bely was only twenty years old when he wrote the Second Symphony, and this was his first completed long work after the juvenile First Symphony. It would not be surprising if the disjunction between the parts of the Second was due simply to a beginning author's inexpert hand. This is in fact suggested by Bely's recollection of how he wrote the work. The early part was a diary-like record of his walks across Moscow with his close friend Sergei Soloviev (the philosopher's nephew)— a diary he kept to read out loud at Mikhail Soloviev's tea table. Mikhail Sergeevich, Sergei's father, "encouraged" the diary, "and for the first time the thought arose: to give a plot to the sketches [osiuzhetit' nabroski]." But only after passing a university examination in physics did Bely launch into the second part, completing it in approximately twenty-four hours. 4 9 Even more revealing is Bely's candid avowal in a letter from 1902 to a new acquaintance: The idea of a Symphony as such came to me only beginning with the second part . . . The first is an appendage that has a very slight and frequently external link to "the symphony as such." It's true that in the fourth part there are attempts to create an analogy with the first, but these attempts do not redeem the inappropriateness of the first.50 -3Sergei Musatov's failed apocalyptic program dominates parts two through four of the Symphony, and all the other plot lines gain significance in relation to it. Initially presented as an attractive and forceful

The Symphonies

33

character (pp. 211-212), Musatov commits a grievous eschatological error by confusing mundane reality for a spiritual ideal. The reader's conclusion that Musatov has erred (according to his own criteria) is reinforced by the episodic appearance of personages who understand this mistake and articulate the correct view of the apocalypse. One of these is the deceased Vladimir Soloviev himself. Thus the reader is manipulated into making judgments about Musatov on the basis of information and observations judiciously selected and presented by the narrator, who usually refrains from commenting in his own voice. Musatov—to whom the narrator refers as the "prophet" (p. 213) with an irony that does not become apparent until near the end of the Symphony—proclaims the imminent birth of a world savior whose mother will be the "woman clothed with the sun." The child will "shepherd the peoples with a staff of iron," and with his mother will enter the final fray against the serpent (pp. 211-213, 273). In short, Musatov preaches the Solovievian refraction of the Bibical Revelation of St. John. He also yearns to be the one who will effect a new synthesis between the decadent West and the still potent "hot blood" of the Russian East (pp. 239240), which recalls Soloviev s desire for, and efforts on behalf of, a reconciliation of Western and Eastern Christian churches (anticipating a similar theme in The Silver Dove). An active pursuit of a spiritual reality thus typifies Musatov's behavior. Most significantly, this characteristic seems to be the reason for his downfall. As Bely dramatizes it, Musatov's central error is basically one of misperception: 1. He whispered prayerfully: "Woman, clothed with the sun, reveal yourself to your standard bearer! Hear your prophet!" 2. And suddenly his severe countenance expressed extreme embarrassment. 3. He recalled a familiar image: two blue eyes, framed by reddish hair, a silvery voice and the sadness of otherworldly [bezmirnykh] lips. 4. With one arm she cooled herself with a fan, answering foolish remarks in kind. 5. That is how he had seen her at the ball given by the marshal of the nobility. 6. He whispered in embarrassment: "Woman, clothed with the sun . . ." (p. 249) Apparently, under the pressure of his desire to see her, Musatov projects onto a beautiful but vapid society lioness the image of Soloviev's Eternal Feminine. Similarly, later in the Symphony, he makes the even more egregious mistake of confusing her daughter for the man-child who will become the savior of the human race (p. 297).

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 repeatedly—but only implicitly—contrasted 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

takes of the Moscow mystics, including Musatov (p. 295). In this, he repeats the critique of Vladimir Soloviev himself, present supernaturally, and his companion Bars Ivanovich (pp. 282-284). "Bars" means "snow leopard" in Russian, and thus has associations with the Dionysian tiger, and, in turn, with Bely s own special conception of Nietzsche as a precursor of Soloviev. It is also worth noting the Bely himself claimed to have encountered the "white shade" of Soloviev, and to have conversed with him in dreams after the philosopher's death. 54 The final canonization of the "passive and knowing" stance with regard to the apocalypse specifically occurs near the end of part four. The enigmatic figure is introduced to the quiet and passive Father John as Aleksei Sergeevich Petkovsky. 55 The priest greets him joyously, and during their conversation about the failures of Musatov and the other Moscow mystics utters the crucial observation: "We make no conclusions and do not speak of anything . . . We only wait. [For] Your Glory, o Lord." Shortly thereafter, the narrator adds that the two listened silently to the "eternal approach . . . And, it seemed—that something was flying with noise and singing" (p. 323). The italics in the text emphasize the importance of these words for Bely, and undoubtedly refer to the Second Coming. Important evidence extrinsic to the Second Symphony supports my inference about the value Bely placed on a passive epistemologica! stance. In early diary-like entries he refers a number of times to the importance of "listening" to the approach of a cosmic upheaval, rather than "reading, thinking, or making conclusions" about it. And in comparing Nietzsche and Soloviev, Bely concludes that the latter "listened" and "saw" better than the former precisely because he was more passive.56 However, the problem with Musatov is not only that his active stance is diametrically opposed to the correct passive one of the positive characters. His willfulness, which is, after all, a form of pride, and consequently an echo of the cause of Lucifer's fall and man's first sin in Eden, appears to be the fatal flaw that the transcendent uses to destroy him. Musatov's fate is highly revealing—a paradigm, in fact—of Bely's deterministic view of man's tie to the transcendent. Moreover, Musatov prefigures Darialsky and Kudeiarov in The Silver Dove, who are also doomed because of their active theurgic stance«. That Musatov was a victim of the otherworldly is suggested by repeated references to the fact that "Eternity joked [shutila] with her favorite" (for instance, pp. 254, 267). Musatov is convinced that he is the "herald of Eternity" (p. 267), and that Eternity "lit a new star" for him and "pointed out" to him both the woman clothed with the sun and her child (p. 293). Later, after Musatov in fact makes the mistaken identifi-

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 child—of 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

seemed—somewhere beyond the wall that someone's footsteps were approaching" [p. 323]. The italics are Bely's, and the context clearly suggests that these footsteps are related to the imminent Second C o m ing.) Finally, in response to his frightened question about what the future holds, the demon tells Musatov not about the apocalypse and a hope for universal renewal, but that "the Negro" is the "coming master of the world" (p. 311). In the context of the Symphony and some of Bely's later writings this is obviously meant to signify an issueless barbarism. 58 A brief glance back at Bely's theory of symbolic perception indicates that he must have been of two minds with regard to the "[Platonic] ideas" or "Eternity" that one must learn to see in phenomena. Judging by Musatov's example, the transcendent plays the decisive role in human perception, and, in fact, seems to initiate it. Thus, by implication, all creativity is the effect of a transcendent cause, rather than the result of an individual's effort. -4In Bely's later works increasing numbers of characters experience ever greater coercion by a transcendent realm. In other words, Musatov's solitary fate of being toyed with by heaven, while other characters resign themselves to whatever cosmic processes may bring them, gradually becomes superseded by visions of all protagonists in thrall to forces that are largely beyond their ken, and that intrude into their lives. This is perhaps the heart of Bely's later world view and art, and is dramatized in the last two Symphonies as well as, with exceptional brilliance and most fully, in The Silver Dove, Petersburg, and Kotik Le-

taev.

It is also neatly played out in a small, strategically located scene in the second part of the Second Symphony that has the added interest of illustrating a basic stylistic feature of Bely's: his characteristic rapid shifts in narrative focus and point of view. Much of the nervous texture (and difficulty) of his narratives, from the Symphonies through Petersburg and Kotik Letaev, is due to this distinctive feature, which is ultimately a formal reflection of Bely's metaphysics. The sequence of passages begins with a scene in which the "passive and knowing one" is sitting quietly, drinking tea, and apparently contemplating God. If someone had an acute sense of hearing, the narrator explains, he would be able to discern the distant summons of a horn, for it was as if Soloviev were standing on a chimney and trumpeting. Such privileged perceptions by the narrator, which exceed the sensibilities of most characters, are widespread in the Symphony (for example, pp. 1 3 6 , 1 5 4 , 237), and typify Bely's later works as well. Then Bely

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 view—one 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 métonymie contiguity, the arrival of the "interplanetary sphere" in the earth's atmosphere is twice associated with the apocalyptic fate of the world—the 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 it—as 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 métonymie 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

The Symphonies

41

the transcendent's design (a possible foreshadowing of Darialsky's fate in The Silver Dove). What is particularly noteworthy about this sequence, however, is that the movement in the narrative from the "fairytale"'s revelation through sentence 10 is founded on a metaphorical similarity among the constituent elements, rather than contiguous relationships. There is, in other words, a consciousness selectively stringing the images together, rather than a camera lens panning across an existing scene. In the next two verses the narrator returns briefly to Musatov, and then takes several even more extreme metaphorical leaps. A two-verse cluster deals with an excited general who is preparing to play a cylindrical phonograph recording of a singer. The singer repeats "Good, good, this is very good" after each couplet in the song (p. 298). These words are clearly an ironic comment on Musatov's mistake, and the image of the recording itself suggests the repetitiveness and, possibly, the theme of Eternity from the first part of the Symphony. Next comes another two-verse-long segment, with numbering beginning anew, in which a cook frying pancakes says that the first one turned out badly, a lump (pervyi blin, da komom). He hopes that the others will turn out well, and throws the ruined one to a "greedy dog" (p. 299). This segment is also clearly an ironic comment on Musatov's failure, especially since the cook's words are a well-known Russian proverb about failed first attempts. Before this unusual, choppy narrative returns to Musatov briefly, several other clusters of verses linked by metaphoric similarity appear. In one of them, characters in a play—a "dreamer" and his "white woman"—are swept away by an avalanche. The narrator adds that "This was not reality, but representation . . . And they quickly drew the curtain because there was nothing to represent" (p. 299). Here Bely puns on the Schopenhauerian theme of the first part of the Symphony, hints at the transcendent's willful play with humans on the world stage, and at the same time makes yet another veiled comment about the illusory and inconsequential character of Musatov's now dashed hopes. Bely s widespread utilization of such transitions between discrete short scenes is undoubtedly part of his attempt to create a new genre, and is probably related to his wish to eliminate the traditional distinction between poetry and prose. This would remain his goal some thirty years later when he spoke of seeking to eliminate "the antithesis: poetry— prose." 61 Indeed, the way he arranges his text on the page resembles somewhat the way in which poetry is usually printed (even more than music). But metricized passages and alliteration are so rare in the Symphony that were it not for the special typographic segmentation of the text it would read like plain prose. 62

42

Andrei Bely

In Jakobsons view, transitions between syntactic elements in realistic prose tend to be métonymie, whereas Romantic and Symbolist works (and lyric poetry in general) tend to be dominated by metaphor. The reason why Bely as a Symbolist would be drawn by metaphor is clear: the trope corresponds well to a profoundly holistic world view in which all phenomena are potential candidates for linkage because they all share a common grounding in the transcendent realm. Accumulating a sequence of scenes or images in which neighboring pairs are connected as a result of the ability of the ordering consciousness to perceive similarities between them would naturally also appeal to Bely; it would be the work of the creative form of cognition that he postulates in his early essays and develops to an extreme in his mature works. Metonymie transitions also appear in the Symphony, confirming this genre as a hybrid form with a narrative dimension. But the simple fact of these transitions obviously does not make sections of the Symphony "realistic." As I mentioned above, underlying the latter three parts of the Symphony is a Solovievian conception of imminent apocalypse, which thus makes all terrestrial events into de facto symbols of the grand cosmic process. Musatov's misperception of a mortal society woman as the woman clothed with the sun may thus be understood as a foreshadowing of mankind's misperception of the Antichrist. Hence the whole Second Symphony can be thought of as consisting of two symbolic "axes"—the vertical, which entails perceptions of a higher apocalyptic reality by the narrator and by some characters (for example, Vladimir Soloviev's trumpeting), and the horizontal, which is the sequence of proto-apocalyptic events experienced by Musatov and the other characters alone. The lyrical, first-person symbolic perceptions by the narrator-author, and the symbolic significance of the characters' perceptions and actions, both point to the same higher transcendent unity, suggesting that both may derive from it in some way (as Bely will claim in Petersburg). Moreover, the fact that the Second Symphony shows characters to be enacting symbolic events constantly, both consciously and not, suggests that the author may be doing so as well (but this is not a step that Bely actually takes in the work, although he will later). Both symbolic axes are also characteristic features of Bely's Third Symphony and the three major novels, where the two axes are reconciled into a spiraling development that several characters undergo, as does the narrator-author, by implication. The narrative dimension in the Symphony may also be indicative of another aspect of symbolic cognition that is important for Bely. Because his narrator and characters accumulate symbolic perceptions during the course of the text, so does the reader. This causes the reader

The Symphonies

43

to experience gradually deepening insights into the higher reality that is the foundation of the world of the work, which is the author's generally didactic artistic purpose. In this regard, Bely's Symbolist narratives differ significantly from his own and other Symbolists' lyric poems, which are typically characterized by single epiphanies or isolated perceptions rather than sequences of them. Cycles of poems, relatively common among Russian Symbolists, obviously fall into a different category. Bely's conviction that all aspects of existence were interconnected led him to claim in Petersburg that life and art were literally continuous, and that his fictional creations possessed a mode of being equal to that of his readers. This conception represents an extreme variant of the metaphoric transitions between planes of existence discussed above. Such an intentional confusion, or, better to say, melding of life and art already appeared in a primitive form in the First Symphony. There is also a hint of it in the Second. First of all, the ontological weight that music has in Schopenhauer's metaphysics—as a direct expression of the Will—is clearly relevant to all the Symphonies. Secondly, aside from the claims Bely made in his "Instead of a Foreword," real people appear on the pages of the work. The writer Max Nordau, whom Bely portrays in his memoirs as an object of youthful scorn, 6 3 is made to arrive in Moscow (p. 178). A forthcoming book by Valéry Briusov and Konstantin Balmont is mentioned (p. 194), as are other writers. In a related vein, the narrator calls the "fairytale" s husband a "centaur" who has "received the right to citizenship since Böcklin's time" (p. 145). This playful remark about a widespread subject in the paintings of an artist Bely admired around the turn of the century is a direct adumbration of the ontological claims he would make in Petersburg. An amusing incident from Bely's own life illustrates the extent to which he went in introducing artistic fantasy into everyday existence— the complement, as it were, of having Nordau appear in the Symphony. In 1903, together with several friends, Bely began to act as if Moscow were in fact populated by unicorns, centaurs, and other mythical creatures. He even had visiting cards printed up for some of these invented beings, with appropriately fanciful names and addresses, which he distributed among friends. His blending of art and life went very far, moving Sergei Soloviev to note at the time: "Recently Bugaev raised a commotion with his Ogygs, Unicorns, etc. A psychiatrist was almost summoned, and it was quite painful for both him and for us." 64 Probably out of political expediency, Bely later tried to play down these activities as mere games characteristic for his set at the turn of the century. 65 But even if peopling a city with creatures of the imagination

44

Andrei Bely

may have been a pose in part, it is also indicative of a tendency that would eventually become a principle in his belletristic and theoretical writings. -5The Second Symphony is one of several prose works by Bely with a prefatory statement that gives his readers some sense of what his intentions were. "This work has three meanings," Bely writes. T h e satirical meaning or side, which I already mentioned, itself has several dimensions. In addition to the outré Solovievian Sergei Musatov, there are a number of veiled parodies of contemporaries who were inclined toward the otherworldly, such as Drozhzhikovsky or Merezhkovich (Merezhkovsky), Shipovnikov (Rozanov), the Norwegian lion (Ibsen), the Belgian Anchorite (Maeterlinck), and so forth. There are also parodies of other teachings, including theosophy, Hinduism, and the philosophies of Kant and Nikolai Fedorov, to mention just some of the most egregious examples. All clearly fall into the category of "certain extremes of mysticism" that Bely identified in his prefatory remarks as the butt of his satire (p. 125). Satire remains a major element in Bely's later works as well. But apart from his desire to continue ridiculing error and absurdity, it is most important to realize that he may also have been drawn to satire for what may be termed metaphysical reasons. In a revealing early critical fragment about the comic in music, Bely speaks of "humor that stands on the border between laughter through tears and the frankly funny. This mood is only a generic [rodovoe] lack of correspondence between the ideal and its realization." 6 6 Lavrov, the publisher of this fragment, concludes that in his first two Symphonies especially Bely was trying to achieve the irony and humor he saw in certain musical compositions. Indeed, such a conception of the Second Symphony's satirical level explains why Bely spoke of satire as a component of his symbolism. It is not simply that satire adds a level of complexity or ambiguity, such as one expects to find in a Symbolist work. Rather, it is a way of speaking about a metaphysical ideal and the reality that falls short of it, all in the same breath. In the Second Symphony Musatov's eschatology is the clearest example of the distance between the "ideal and its realization." The "philosophical irony" that appeared in germinal form in the First Symphony can thus be said to have blossomed fully in the Second, as it will continue to do in The Silver Dove and Petersburg.67 The other two meanings or sides of the work that Bely discusses in the prefatory statement are "the musical" and the "ideal-symbolic"

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 Symphony—the 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 expectations—and 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

2. It was the fairytale . . . 3. And again, and again, they looked at each other, she and the little nun, and smiled as might those who knew each other. 4. Without words they communicated to each other that not everything was yet lost, that there still remained many sacred joys for people . . . 5. That it was approaching, coming, the dear, impossible, the sadly-pensive . . . (p. 325) The nun's connection to the Symphony is largely through the mood of expectation that colors her image and saturates the work as a whole. She is clearly also the "fairytale" 's double, but with the difference that she is waiting for the Biblical "bridegroom." The "fairytale," even though presented without irony in the passage quoted above, is the incarnation of more banal and superficial longings and embodies the distance between the ideal and the reality that falls short of it: "I smile like a doll, while my soul asks for something that doesn't exist, something that could have happened, but didn't," she tells her husband (p. 319). Most likely, she is referring to such matters as the death of her admirer, "the democrat" or "the dreamer." However, given the pattern in the Symphony of the terrestrial microcosmos being determined by the cosmic macrocosmos, even the "fairytale" s mundane loving impulses must inevitably be a reflection of something like the Gnostic conception of the human soul's longing for its otherworldly origins. Leitmotifs continue to be an important feature of the Second Symphony's musical structure, as they were in the First. These are short syntactical units within which meaning, rather than rhythm or alliteration, is the dominant feature. When repeated, however, both in their entirety and in part, these units inevitably add a weak rhythmical and alliterative dimension to the work. Moreover, since individual leitmotifs recur in different contexts throughout the Symphony, they echo each other across the space of the intervening text and add a layer of atemporal unity to it. In the Second Symphony and in all of Bely's major later works this "timeless" feature of the leitmotifs helps make them into signs for the transcendent that rules over the world of man. The Third Symphony The Third Symphony (written in 1901-1902; published in 1905) 6 9 is unique among all of Bely's artistic works. To begin with, its text looks different from the preceding Symphonies: the short paragraphs, or verses, are no longer numbered. Although clusters of these verses are still separated by double spacing, numbers are reserved only for groups of clusters, which, as a result, acquire the appearance of short chapters. The net effect is to make the texture of the prose less fragmented and

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 Symphony—a 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 terrestrial—one 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 protégé 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 view—namely, 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 selfcreation—of 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

demnation of the lukewarm in spirit (Revelation 3: 15-16). But neither is ceaseless striving a good in and of itself. The core of Khandrikov's remarks is a series of hypotheses about what man's condition in the universe might be. Human life may be no more than the precipitation of crystals to the bottom of a container. Furthermore, man, like some chemical precipitate, may be subjected to a series of experimental transformations. This imagery obviously derives from Bely s course work in a Moscow University chemistry laboratory at the same time that he was writing the Third Symphony. 7 6 But the processes he mentions, if applied to the human condition, clearly suggest the possibility that man may be completely under the sway of forces outside his ken. Then Khandrikov launches into speculations about a variety of cyclical human conditions. Perhaps everything returns, or changes, he suggests. Progress may move along a straight line, or a circle, or a spiral. He hypothesizes that the spiral of mankind's progress may be different from the spiral of "atoms' progress," and the latter may be wrapped around the former. And mankind's spiral of progress may be wrapped around a single loop of a spiral of the highest order. Perhaps, he continues, each point in time and space is the common intersection of many spiral paths of "different types of orders" (raznoriadnykh poriadkov). Thus man may actually be living simultaneously in the distant past as well as the present and the future. Time and space may not actually exist, therefore, and man may be using these terms only for simplicity's sake. But Khandrikov is also willing to allow that this simplicity may in fact be the synthesis of many spiral paths, and that all that exists in time and space is actually what it seems. He concludes his litany of possibilities by saying that even mathematics has given birth to the theory of probability and to indeterminate equations, and that "Everything flows. Flies. Speeds along misty circles. The enormous tornado of the world carries each life in its stormy embrace. Before it is emptiness. And behind—the same" (pp. 8 0 - 8 4 ) . But if all that Khandrikov can do is propose these fascinating possibilities, Bely himself has embodied at least a partial answer in the Third Symphony. In this feature, the Symphony is also unique among Bely's works of belles lettres, because nowhere else are the far-reaching questions contained in Khandrikov's proposals raised explicitly. They are broached in Bely's theoretical essays, of course, and constitute the implicit foundation of all his art. In the essay "Symbolism as a World View," for example, Bely speaks of "the spiral journey of the soul through time" that reveals the periodic surfacing of Eternity in human existence. 7 7 Full answers to these questions, however, are never given

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 years—a 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 Bely—leads to his "resurrection" as the Child once again. And the Old Man greets him with: "Many times I crowned you with suffering—its 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 it—Bely 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 them—which 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 ones—in a twodimensional plane—but 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 Böcklin'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

brought back a heightened awareness with him. Significantly, Doctor Orlov now comes to him (p. 71), and henceforth Khandrikov becomes increasingly aware of Tsenkh as his enemy and the Doctor as his ally. Eventually, of course, he advances to the point of making the transition through a kind of death back to the Old Man's world. The result of such shifts to different planes of awareness, which also seem to be different planes of being, is to make the protagonist's movement along the loop of his spiral incremental, and not either continuous or simply dual. The text suggests that there are realms higher than those the Child achieves. The Old Man is hierarchically above the Child, and, moreover, speaks of God—yet another higher level—which the Child does not do. Thus, although the Third Symphony shows a fair amount of the supernatural, it is still reticent about the ultimate mysteries. The conception of human nature exemplified in the Child/Khandrikov has an important bearing on such seemingly problematic aspects of Bely's later work as the multivoiced narrator in The Silver Dove and Petersburg. Rather than being evidence of Bely's inconsistency, the narrator's ability to shift from earthbound to visionary voices should be seen as a reflection of the multiplanar composition of human nature— one that includes both physical and complex spiritual dimensions. In terms of artistic effect on the reader, there is a positive correlation between a skillfully maintained sense of pregnant mystery and the persuasiveness of the text. Khandrikov's existence—punctuated as it is with flashbacks, "astral voyage"-like dreams, premonitions of the future, and sudden deep symbolic perceptions during which phenomena open up to show the transcendent behind them—makes for engrossing reading in comparison with the part of the Symphony dealing with the Child in his generally very abstract world, which is, moreover, rendered in language that often fails to achieve the grandiloquently sacral tone for which it strives. It is not surprising, therefore, that Bely would abandon forever the form he tried once in the Third Symphony. In fact, if one severs the part dealing with the Child from the text, what is left resembles in many important formal and thematic respects Bely's later works such as Petersburg and Kotik Letaev. The Fourth Symphony Despite some striking passages in it, the Fourth Symphony (written in 1903-1907; published in 1908)81 comes close to being as frustrating as the First in its imbalance between imagery and meaning. Now, however, the tilt is in the opposite direction. Instead of the vague or abstract imagery coupled with obvious portentousness that typifies the First Symphony, the Fourth is filled with visually striking images whose sense is often entirely unclear.

The Symphonies

55

In a memoir Bely referred to the work as "quadruply crippled." 8 2 He was also willing to acknowledge the Symphony's weakness from the very outset. The detailed "Instead of a Preface" anticipates that a reader may find the work "boring, long-winded, and written for the sake of the colorful tints of certain of its scenes" (p. 3). Although, regrettably, one can only agree with this evaluation, Bely's attempt to account for his lack of success is another matter. He attributes it to the way he chose to fulfill the artistic task he set himself. He wanted to depict, as exactly as possible, "certain inner experiences [perezhivaniia] that underlie . . . daily life and that are in essence incapable of being incarnated into images." His method was to select the most appropriate image for a given inner state. And it is here, Bely states, that he ran into a methodological quandary. Should he have been guided by the beauty of the image, or by its ability to accommodate the maximum of the inner state in question? This obviously suggests the two were not necessarily compatible in his mind. Moreover, how should he bring together internal connections among inner experiences (that ultimately cannot be expressed in images) with the connections among images themselves? Two choices lay before him: one was "the path of art"; the second was analysis of the inner states and their decomposition into component parts. The latter was what he chose. And so he remains unsure if the Fourth Symphony is a work of art, or a "document about the state of the consciousness of a contemporary soul,"something of interest only to some psychologist in the future (p. 1). (This view of the work is particularly revealing of his consistent melding of life and art, at the same time that it begs the question of the relation of characters to "a contemporary soul.") Other writings of Bely's shed light on this somewhat muddled account of unsuccessfully realized intentions. In fact, all of the questions he raises turn out to be aspects of his evolving theory of symbolism. In essays contemporaneous with his work on the Fourth Symphony, Bely repeatedly defined symbols as the embodiment of internal experiences in images that could be drawn either from the visible world or from fantasy. 83 In his prefatory remarks to the Symphony, Bely in effect acknowledges dissatisfaction with the symbols he has created. It is interesting, however, that Bely apparently also encountered certain practical problems while working on the Symphony that he did not anticipate in his essays. His a priori dismissal of the possibility that an inner experience ever could be embodied fully in an image is one example. (This also presents a striking contrast to the ontological claims for his "fictions" that Bely makes in other works.) Another difficulty was how to combine a series of inner experiences with their corresponding sequence of images. Yet he glossed over this very problem in

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 agency—in 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 Dürer 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 phony—that 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 themes—two 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

to suggest too much. As a result, Bely's remarks prefacing the text of the Symphony might be best taken as a post facto attempt to rationalize a surprising failure—surprising, because he had created successful symbols before the Fourth Symphony (in the Second, and to an extent in the Third) and would create others immediately afterwards (in The Silver Dove). In addition to broaching the complex topic of symbolic methodology in his prefatory remarks, Bely also focuses on the Symphony's overt theme and its formal characteristics. About the former he says that he wanted "to depict the entire scale of that special sort of love that our epoch dimly anticipates, just as Plato, Goethe, Dante anticipated it earlier—sacred love" (p. 3). To be more accurate, he might have explained that he was concerned with love in the context of Solovievian apocalypticism, but, most likely, that is what "sacred love" meant for him in the first place. Bely's elaborate claims about the formal experiment he was conducting are a more complicated matter. He makes the frank admission that in his previous three Symphonies the "structure arose by itself, and I did not have a clear idea of what a 'Symphony' in literature should be" (pp. 1 - 2 ) . Now, however, he became interested in the "constructional mechanism of that form of which I was vaguely conscious." But despite the elaborate explanation of the form of the Fourth Symphony, this dimension of the work remains largely inaccessible even to the well-disposed and attentive reader. Bely claims to have striven especially for exactitude in the exposition of his themes, in their counterpoint, in connections among them, and the like. He explains how each of the first two parts of the Symphony has its own group of themes, and which sections of the second part contain the three component subthemes. These three subthemes "come into contact" with the themes of the first part and form the fabric of the work's third and fourth parts. 8 9 Bely even gives an example of the pattern of variation and repetition, whereby, he claims, a section in part three echoes one in part two. He also explains that in order to fully understand the meaning of the symbols in the Symphony one must understand its structure, which requires being aware of the theme to which a given symbolic image belongs, the number of times the theme of this image has already been repeated, and what other images accompanied it. A reader who follows these instructions will understand ninety-nine percent of the meaning of the internal experiences embodied in the Symphony; one who does not will only understand fifty percent (pp. 2 - 3 ) . Bely was obviously uncomfortable with these elaborate and, practically speaking, unjustified claims. He admits that he often had to

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-

Although the Symphonies are Bely's original formal creation, they both echoed and foreshadowed a number of important developments in modern prose fiction that in part grew out of nineteenth-century European Symbolism. Anton Kovac has suggested that the Fourth Symphony in particular "bears an intriguing resemblance to what Ralph Freedman has called 'the lyrical novel'." 90 Freedman identifies a strand in twentieth-century German, French, and English narrative prose— represented by Hermann Hesse, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf—that combines features from novels and lyrical poetry, with the result that "the lyrical novel shifts the reader's attention from men and events to a formal design. The usual scenery of fiction becomes a texture of imagery, and characters appear as personae for the self." This description is especially relevant for the Fourth Symphony, but several other of Freedman's formulations can also be profitably borne in mind. At the heart of the "lyrical novel" lies a particular type of epistemologica! stance, one in which the perceiving subject allows his consciousness to merge with objects in the world outside himself, which he then presents in their transmuted state as art. This resembles the form of perception underlying nineteenth-century Symbolist works in general, and recalls Bely's theory of symbolism. Moreover, in Freedman's examples, the fusion of the world and the self occur in a "passive hero," a process comparable to Bely's making the actions of his characters into reflections of a coercive transcendent (even though, paradoxically, in his theoretical writings Bely stresses the existential creative act of the perceiver as a first principle). Freedman's study is also useful for providing a context that shows Bely's Symphonies (and later novels) to be part of trends in European literature broader than self-conscious Symbolism alone. Both the German Romantics and the French Symbolists had reacted against comparable conventional world views: eighteenth-century realism and nineteenth-century naturalism, respectively. "Romantic estheticism" was itself spread through European literature by the late nineteenth-century

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 achieve—he 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

Time will stop: the world will cease rushing forward. And the past will return, (p. 114) The return of souls is further linked with rectilinear time in the opus that Adam Petrovich's friend, the "mystic," wrote about love. This episodic character is treated with respect by the narrator, in contrast to the various individuals Bely satirizes in a style reminiscent of the Second Symphony (pp. 18, 22-24, 32-33, 45-47). He is also said to have "secreted under a mask [his] loving knowledge about Christ—authoritatively, wisely, insistently." In addition to having gathered "gnostic wisdom about love," he proclaims "The End is coming" (p. 46). In the Third Symphony, the helical movement of time which the Child/Khandrikov was forced to endure implied a strongly deterministic cosmos. In the Fourth, it is again difficult to assess Bely's view of free will as opposed to determinism. It would seem, however, that he opted for making the characters themselves responsible for their fates by having Adam Petrovich and Svetlova struggle successfully against sexual passion in favor of spiritual love. This is also implied in Bely's creation of characters who have erred in their paths. He has "mystical anarchists" proclaim: "The more sacredly, the more inexpressibly the mystery sighs, the more narrow is the line separating it from sodomite mystery" (p. 48). As his memoirs attest, Bely was violently opposed to Georgy Chulkov and his "mystical anarchism" because of its unprincipled and unmethodical eclecticism. 95 Thus, any belief put into the anarchists' mouths (fairly or unfairly) automatically becomes heretical. Bely goes so far as to include a pair of sodomites—whose "lips . . . snake with a forbidden smile" (p. 49)—on the page that follows in order to underscore the actuality of the threat implied in their perverse formulation. The fact that Adam Petrovich repeats the same sentiment about sacred love being close to profane as an argument to persuade Svetlova to yield physically to him (p. 141) shows that the idea is erroneous, precisely because when the two do not succumb to it, they are resurrected into a divine realm as their reward. On the other hand, the question remains whether the impulses toward good and evil that characters experience and ultimately follow come from within themselves or from a spiritual realm that guides even their thoughts. In The Silver Dove, Petersburg, and Kotik Letaev Bely will decide in favor of the latter. -4Bely's symbolism in the Fourth Symphony does not help to resolve the question about the provenance of either the narrator's or the characters' "inner experiences." The problematic nature of the symbolic im-

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 made—the 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 coupés, 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 louder—fall like a fountain, fall! And with splashes of laughter bemoan enthusiastically [oplakivaite vostorzhenno]\ (p. 63)

66

Andrei Bely

The chapter-like section following these lines is entitled "The Marble Genius." This naturally acts as a clue, and one concludes that the narrator is describing a fountain. Again, as in the case of the snow storm, the rhythm of Bely's phrases captures nicely something of the play of water. Possibly the water images are meant to contrast with the snow in part one, but this is uncertain. The passages that follow offer a fragmentary glimpse of a "white sad head" belonging to an unspecified "he" (p. 64). Other physical details are mentioned: the figure is holding a spear, and it is associated with time. This of course evokes an automatic contrast with eternity. Among other related images that are developed at some length in this sequence is the following particularly opaque one: In purple, in the purple of roses, dimly burning out of pearls as in an aureole of fire, the face grew dead; his bitter face grew dead, like the visage of the airy moon, uselessly saturated with azure on a summer day, and like a handful of frozen snow, melting into azure [obtaiavshem lazur'iu] around the edges, (p. 64) Not until approximately two pages into this section do we finally read: "Colonel Svetozarov stood there like a giant, in a morning robe, covered all over with patches of light, and with a spear instead of a walking stick [sic]" (p. 65). So the fountain imagery is apparently somehow related to him. But neither this sudden change in narrative strategy, from "painting" with images to explaining by means of a declarative sentence, nor anything that follows, illuminates two pages of intricately rendered images. Bely is the last artist imaginable who would indulge in descriptive passages for their own sake. And even if the repetition of leitmotifs was his main point, it cannot be said that the resulting rhythm yields any additional meaning. In all fairness, there are occasional successful symbolic images in the Fourth Symphony. For example, Bely renders brilliantly (but ultimately untranslatably) the "cheetah" leitmotif that consists of periodic manifestations of the animal in different contexts: Golden, airy beasts threw themselves at them, and rushed back. It was as if a wild flock, moaning through the wind, had been thrown into the greenery; and now the cheetahs were tearing them to pieces with their strong paws, gnawing their breasts with bloody, fiery [zarevymi], airy fangs; shattering on their breasts as waves of leaves, flowers, patches of sunset, and cold, cold dew. Behind their backs they arose again. So the cheetahs flew, cut out in the greenery as patches of light, together with the rushing bushes, from horizon to horizon.

The Symphonies

67

The future threatened with a roaring flock of beast moments, the past ran away as the same flock; the present tore the moments with waves of leaves, flowers and shadow, and a cold, cold torrent of tears, (p. 104) Svetozarov is pursuing Svetlova in this scene, and, as their horses rush through the forest, the cheetahs appear out of the play of sunlight on greenery. The images are highly evocative, and the slight touch of confusion in them only adds to their effectiveness. Bely's choice of a large, predatory, cat-like animal may be an evocation of Dionysus, who was occasionally associated with a lion and other large felines. This, in turn, suggests sacral orgiastic rites, as well as death and resurrection. The developed image of onrushing beasts serves well, therefore, as an expression of the lust that motivates Svetozarov, as well as the passion—sacred and profane—that is a dominant theme of the Symphony as a whole." Since death and resurrection are the central mystery of Bely's essentially Christian world view, the theme of time that is broached at the end of the passage just quoted broadens the image of cheetahs to include eschatology. These dominant associations also arise with the appearance of the cheetah images elsewhere (pp. 68, 83, 135, 137, 142). But ultimately, the meaning of this symbolic leitmotif hinges on associations drawn from outside the Symphony, rather than on what was developed within it. Other successful symbolic images are at once more brief and less portentous, such as the following rendering of the sweet interior tremor that Svetlova's passing by evokes in Adam Petrovich: "She scattered forget-me-nots over the glistening parquet with the train of her dress" (p. 37). Similarly, when Adam Petrovich asks what must be a rhetorical question, "Who can forbid me to only think of her?" a sequence of images appears that provides the answer: An invisible someone whispered to him with snow and wind: "To think about her? Well, no one, of course." Snowily kissed him, tenderly threw—threw under his feet a handful of diamonds. Threw. Swarms of spurting sparks, having blinded [him?] were already flying: flying—they flew off from under his feet in the white velvet of snow. (p. 50) These and various other instances suggest that Bely's symbolic method can work marvelously well—a supposition that will of course be borne out by his series of great novels.

The Silver Dove 2 . . . izmenish' oblik Ty (. . . You will change Your countenance) Aleksandr Blok

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 fiction—indeed, of early Russian Modernist prose—before 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

The Silver Dove

69

itself have lost. In Tselebeevo, Petr woos and wins Katia—the 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 Matrena—a 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-

The central role assigned to symbolic cognition in The Silver Dove is signaled by the narrator in the novel's opening lines, when he begins to set the scene for his story by describing the repetitive pealing that issues from the Tselebeevo church belfry "into the blue abyss of day" (I, 9; 5)—a phrase that is repeated twice more in the novel's first paragraph. What is important about the phrase is its hint of a dualistic perception: the everyday phenomenon of the blue sky seems to be underlain by a portentous depth. Furthermore, the image contains a suggestion of an opposition between good (day) and evil (abyss). This is a classic example of a symbol as Bely understood the term. The perceiver (the narrator in this case) creates an artifact—the image that exists only in the words that embody it (it could not be readily painted, for example)—by infusing something he has seen with his "internal experience." And because these are rooted in a transcendent realm (as Bely explains in the essays "The Emblematics of Meaning," 1909, and "The Crisis of Consciousness and Henrik Ibsen," 1910), the resulting symbol becomes an expression of a supernatural truth. A few pages later, the narrator shares a similar, but somewhat more expanded version of this perception with the protagonist, Petr Darialsky, and asks: "And the sky? And its pale air, which at first is pale but, if scrutinized closely, is completely black?" (I, 17; 12). Here the

70

Andrei Bely

narrator is stressing that something negative may actually appear to be positive at first. The light mood of mystery associated with the sky is extended further into the sphere of nature by an aural perception of the narrators: "Press your ear to the ground in the evening: you will hear how the grasses grow, how the big yellow moon rises over Tselebeevo" (1,11; 7). In this instance, the narrator's experience is synesthetic: he is capable of hearing motion. But in addition to hearing such phenomena as grass growing (which recall topoi from Russian folk tales), he can hear normal sounds of course. The consequence is that the natural world in the novel again seems to fall into two realms—one of surface phenomena, and the other of deeper reality—both of which the narrator perceives at the same time. The sense that there is a dimension beyond the superficial, material reality leads easily to the narrator's view that there may be something sentient in it: "And the grassy waves run, run on; frightened, they will run down the road and break with an unsteady splash; then a little bush by the roadside will sob out and the shaggy dust will leap up" (I, 11; 7). In this passage, and in numerous others like it throughout the novel, the literary trope of personification acquires a significance resembling the one Bely gave it as early as his First Symphony. There is a strong sense that the deeper plane of reality is both potent and ominous. Such a view of personification is in keeping with Bely's theoretical writings on symbolism if the sentient dimension in an image drawn from nature is understood as the result of the narrator's deeper perceptions into the spiritual world underlying the physical plane of being, and not a mere stylistic flourish. An alternative way to reconcile passages such as these with Bely's theoretical writings is to understand the sentient element in the image to be the product of the "inner experiences" of the narrator being projected onto an aspect of the phenomenal world. Since these derive from a supernatural realm, they cannot lead to solipsism, but make man and the world in which he exists into a reflection of the Absolute. Although these two conceptions of symbolism are founded on antipodal premises, both appear to operate in The Silver Dove. The essential difference is between the perceiver being able to see deeply into a spiritual realm that lies outside him, and the perceiver being the recipient of "inner experiences" that derive from the transcendent and flow into the world outside through him. The first alternative raises the question of the extent to which the perceiver must already be "in tune" with the spiritual dimension in order to be able to see it in the first place. The problem of individual volition thus lies at the heart of the

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 perceptions—directed at a wide range of phenomena—point 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

here, but above the world"—namely, a foreshadowing of the battles that would pass through the area during the First World War, and ultimately of the sound of a "collapsing era." 5 Not unexpectedly, comparable experiences continued to fill his life after he became an anthroposophist in 1912. 6 -3The center of the novel's plot is the Doves' classically theurgic plan. Concocted by their leader, Kudeiarov, its grandiose goal is to induce the birth of the world savior through an incarnation of the divine spirit. As the narrator himself admits (adding to the verisimilitude of his narrative, and, at the same time, underscoring the problematic difference between his first-person perceptions and the third-person narrative passages in the text), the details of the Doves' mystical program are not completely clear, and nowhere in the novel is there a point-by-point exposition of all of Kudeiarov's prophecies and beliefs. However, what emerges from various scattered, fragmentary comments is that Kudeiarov is preparing for some sort of Biblical Armageddon (I, 67: 51) by trying to effect a Second Coming, even though he does not personally refer to Christ or the Revelation of St. John. Moreover, he expects that after the incarnation of the spirit there will be a "be-doving" (voskholublenie [sic]) of the earth, and a liberation of the Christian folk (I, 288: 220). Although this victory over the coming Beast, to be achieved through the triumph of the Holy Spirit, is put in religious terms, there is a socio-political dimension to the Doves' plans that echoes the revolutionary turmoil sweeping Russia in 1905, suggesting a link between the Revolution and cosmic events in the minds of the Doves. They print a proclamation announcing that the Antichrist's "bestiality" has placed its seal on God's earth, and summoning the faithful to raise the sword against the nobility, who are Beelzebub's closest servants. In the same breath, the proclamation announces the appearance of the Holy Spirit, and calls for burning the estates of the demon's spawn, because the land belongs to the people (I, 195-196: 150). Moreover, Sukhorukov and others of the Doves want to implement this bizarre program by infiltrating "the socialists" about whom there is much talk throughout the land, and using them for their own ends (1,104: 80). Kudeiarov's theurgic program itself is thus broadly analogous to an act of symbolic perception: the goal of both is to link the worlds of spirit and matter. The difference between them is that Kudeiarov's program requires the mediator to appear in the flesh, while the act of symbolic perception permits mediation to occur in the perceiver's consciousness (or in the symbol he creates), with the perceiver himself (or his symbol) thus becoming the mediator.

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 distinguished—in the worst instances—by 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-

The Silver Dove

75

chei, zazhuzhukal voditsei; pobryzgivaet voditsa, povarchivaet (the stream became indignant, its waters began to buzz; the waters splashed and grumbled; II, 54-55: 270). Fekla Matveevna peers carefully at everything around her, hoping "to see grace." Instead, what she sees is that each stump by the road had assumed the image of a devil; all the way the wind had whistled around Fekla Matveevna and driven dry dust at her; and out of the dust the stumps, the bushes, the branches like devilish mugs grimaced maliciously at her in the sun, driving her back to Likhov. Then the narrator explains that after this experience Eropegina finally understood how many devils there are threatening human nature; invisible to the eye, they swirl above us; only prayer, fasting, and the aspiration to saintliness, by emaciating the flesh endow corporeal sight itself with spiritual sight; and by means of this spiritual sight each material object becomes the image of invisible objects. (II, 5556: 270-271) The last clause is a neat encapsulation of symbolic perception in general. As Eropegina's own experiences unroll, however, they begin to confirm Bely's notion that "inner experiences" are rooted in the otherworldly. After arriving in Tselebeevo, she continues to believe that the demons she saw are besieging the "holy places" of Kudeiarov's domicile. Then, during the night she is "granted" a vision of Kudeiarov commanding her to blot him out of her mind. Later she senses "as if a command from some invisible power: 'All that will be henceforth is good: so it must be'." The first indication that there may be something wrong with this edict comes when Eropegina receives word that her husband has been stricken by paralysis. The reader has of course deduced by now that Kudeiarov and Sukhorukov have been slowly poisoning him all along (if he were to die, his fortune would pass to his widow and then to them because she is a zealous Dove), and that this stroke is the result of an unusually large dose. But Eropegina's reaction as she reads the note is, as the narrator comments, "strange": she hears the same command about all that happens being good, and almost says out loud "So it must be." Although her heart briefly bids her "to weep and be horrified," this impulse passes quickly (II, 58: 273), suggesting that she is literally the plaything of forces that control even her thoughts and perceptions. Most significantly, on her return journey to Likhov, "all those stumps and bushes, which had threatened her so recently, swaying gently in the evening breeze sang a new song about joy ineffa-

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 plane—to 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 á 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 eyes—three 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 nothing—a 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 substance—it'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

The Silver Dove

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-

If in the narrator's eyes Kudeiarov's theurgic plan is compromised first by ambiguity and then by evil, Darialsky's initial ideology and

80

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 élan 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 signs—like werewolves, when dying out, lure men after them—but 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 soul—the 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

The Silver Dove

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 outlived—ancient 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 peasantry—a view from which the narrator distances himself, however—can 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

82

Andrei Bely

one, never." Insofar as this is an egotistical, "personal creation of life," it is precisely what Schmidt faulted in Darialsky. But Darialsky's ideas cannot be completely erroneous, for they also recall elements of the narrator's prophecies. The struggle Petr is experiencing personally is related to the conflict between Russia and the West that precedes their synthesis in the narrator's view:

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 Petr—a personal apocalypse—resembles 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 folk—a 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.

The Silver Dove

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 novel—tentatively 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 country—the traditional locus of uncontaminated, native beliefs—and 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 1909—from the earliest Symphonies to The Silver Dove—was 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 memoirs—a 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

The Silver Dove

85

remarks about Darialsky are nowhere undercut by either the narrator or the other characters, and the narrator's voice surrounds him with an aura of inviolable deference. Finally, Darialsky himself lends authority to Schmidt by seeking his help near the end of the novel when he comes to his senses and decides to escape the Doves. Schmidt is an occultist. His arcane interests include astrology, the Cabala, and a wide range of other esoteric writings that Bely has his narrator list with evident relish. 14 Schmidt is clearly somewhere in the theosophical camp and belongs to a secret organization located outside of Russia. He implies that his distant brethren are capable of influencing fate from afar (suggesting their ability to negate free will), and we know that he has tried to guide Darialsky in the past. It is most significant, however, that he fails. Like the narrator, Schmidt finds that Darialsky's life is clouded by misperceptions. He tries to console Katia, who is distraught at having lost her fiance, by explaining that Petr has been "hypnotized." He also tells her that for the time being "enemies" have triumphed over Petr in the same way that "the enemy" has temporarily triumphed over Russia. This is a metaphysical evil, for Schmidt says that no plain mortals can know the guilty parties who have caused all the "absurdities" (nelepitsy) throughout the land (I, 298: 228). These statements are clearly in harmony with the idea that there is a diabolical influence among the Doves. But most important, they imply that the Doves (the "plain mortals") cannot know what they themselves are doing. Despite the fact that everything dark is now attacking Petr, Schmidt continues, he can still come out victorious. His major sin is a form of egotism: "he must overcome himself within himself, and renounce the personal creation of life" (I, 299: 228). He must reevaluate his relationship to the world; if he can do this, the apparitions that surround him will disappear. In effect, Schmidt suggests that through force of will Darialsky can learn to see the evil around him for what it is—in other words, to stop being deceived by its mimicry of good. But later Schmidt appears to contradict himself when he makes new astrological computations and concludes that Petr "is lost" (II, 16: 240), implying that no effort on the young man's part can change his fate. Thus, from the point of view of Schmidt's pronouncements, the problem of free will is unresolved in The Silver Dove. However, the implications of what he says about Darialsky's potential for overcoming himself and his blindness contradict everything the reader has learned about Darialsky's early life and influences before Tselebeevo. 15 That the course of Petr s entire life was predetermined is suggested by the nature of his involvement with Matrena. The pivotal role she plays in his existence is an extension of Kudeiarov's occult power—which ul-

86

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 Matrena—an antithesis of the Divine Eternal Feminine—emerges 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 fiancée 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 lips—the 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-

88

Andrei Bely

phonies. Cyclical repetitions within a linear progression characterize his existence. Petr moves from alluring dawns to a fatidic nocturnal attraction in the scene with the open window. And if his flirtation with modish radical political beliefs (which the narrator mentions in passing) can be interpreted as a sublimation of his mystical inclinations, Darialsky's existence within the time span of the novel follows another whorl of a spiral: he moves from a negative ideological attraction back to a positive ideal. Indeed, Elsworth points out that The Silver Dove shares the theme of "the return" with the Third Symphony. Before he is killed, Darialsky comes back to Schmidt from the Doves and hopes to rejoin Katia. And at his moment of death, Darialsky's soul returns to an eternal "ether."16 The rectilinear temporal component that transforms these cycles into the loops of a spiral is the apocalyptic teleology saturating the work as a whole. The ascendancy of evil among the Doves, presented by Bely as a temporary triumph of the Solovievian East, clearly appears as a préfiguration of the Antichrist's coming reign. -7Bely's descriptions of how certain ideas and mental images occur to Darialsky—how he thinks and perceives—also clearly support the inference that he is not controlling his own life. The scenes depicting his mental processes are therefore most useful for grasping Bely's developing sense of man's dependence on the transcendent. After seeing Matrena in church, for example, Petr experiences a deeply unsettling sense of déjà-vu. The narrator comments, "This is how Darialsky thought," but then corrects himself and adds: "he wasn't thinking, because the thoughts were taking place [sovershalis'] in his soul without his will" (I, 21:15). Later, while sitting by a lake and watching the reflections in it, Petr muses about what has happened to his soul: it seems to have disappeared somewhere. The narrator's description of these musings centers on the image of a bird of prey attacking its victim (Petr's soul) in midair, which inevitably recalls the dove with a hawk's beak that was embroidered on the Doves' ritual cloth. Then the narrator adds, "and the days flew; and the lightnings of his thoughts that someone had instilled [in him] spurted" (I, 208: 159). At times, Petr's self-consciousness rises to a level that allows him to recognize that something bizarre is happening to him. When he is sitting and fishing for example, he experiences a shift in mood from religious ecstasy to an ominous premonition of death: '"What is it that I am thinking'! Petr tries to understand." Then the narrator explains: "He grasps that it is not he thinking; but that something was 'thinking itself [dumaetsia] in him: it was as if someone had extracted his soul"

The Silver Dove

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 pursuits—which are all elements in Bely's biting satire on his nemesis of the time, the "mystical anarchist" Georgy Chulkov—and 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 matter—to 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 fiancée, 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.

The Silver Dove

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

92

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-

The implications of Bely s theory and practice of symbolism, starting with his earliest Symphony, suggest that he conceived of verbal art not as mere fiction that mirrored a world existing independently of the perceiver, but as a phenomenon approaching the ontological weight of things that really exist. In Petersburg Bely expands his conception of the process implied in "self-thinking thought" to include the narrator-

The Silver Dove

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 novel—a distinction that does not survive translation, and is not a radical one in Russian—is 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

make it difficult to imagine how he could have thought anything other than that he was in harmony with a divine process. But there is no way to be definitive about this on the basis of The Silver Dove alone. It is worth noting, however, that the narrator, who often manipulates the reader into making conclusions for himself, at one point addresses the reader directly on the nature of the text the reader is holding in his hands. Petr is in the Eropegins' house at the end of the novel and has just seen the moribund merchant pass by. The narrator asks the reader what he would do if he saw what Darialsky had just witnessed: "You \ty—the familiar second person pronoun in Russian] have become accustomed to reading about such adventures in novels, but this is neither a novel, nor a fantasy, but . . ." (II, 232: 408). The narrator's failure to complete the thought naturally makes the reader want to try. Ending the sentence with some claim for reality is tempting, even though it would raise the additional problem of having to reconcile such a view of language with that expressed by the narrator in the passage dealing with the ultimate incommunicability of the soul through words. As Gofman has suggested, these are the two polar conceptions of language found in symbolism in general. 1 9 The presence of both in The Silver Dove implies that Bely had not yet resolved this issue for himself. Bely's theory of symbolism seems to imply a faithfulness to absolute truth that is qualitatively different from the approach of other literary schools, such as realism or naturalism, to choose only those that were contiguous with Symbolism's beginnings. Naturalism as defined by Zola in "Le Roman expérimental" (1893), for example, strove to imitate laboratory science by having the author deduce certain laws of social behavior and then release representative character types into a novelistic world dominated by those laws for the purpose of seeing how they behave. Truth about the human condition was of course the overt goal of this plan, even though Zola's practice was not nearly as dispassionate or mechanical as he may have pretended. Nevertheless, the major difference between naturalism and the "horizontal" Symbolism of Baudelaire or Verlaine is that in the former the literary text is only a reflection or record of lived experience that is ultimately independent of the text, while in the latter the text can be seen as the actual locus and very stuff of experience—the verbal incarnation of symbolic perceptions that do not exist except in words. 2 0 In the case of Bely, a "vertical"symbolist, the work of art either rivals or supersedes material reality because the text ultimately derives its authority and ontological weight from a higher, spiritual realm. This view, foreshadowed in the Symphonies and The Silver Dove, receives most complete expression in Pe-

The Silver Dove

95

tersburg and the important theoretical essay "The Magic of Words" (1909).21 Such a conception of symbolist writing begs the question of what constitutes a complete symbolist work, a question Bely did not treat in his theoretical essays. Nevertheless, the development of his fictional prose suggests an answer. It is easy to imagine why, practically speaking, it is impossible to create symbolic verbal art that is the unmediated world of the writer. A pure expression of Bely's theory would yield an endless text that consists of all of the author's conscious moments (recalling the "interior monologue" of Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés). As it happens, a powerful autobiographical bent does characterize the great novels of Bely's mature, middle period, to say nothing of his memoirs of the 1920s and 1930s. Specifically, there is an intensification in the commitment to the experienced minutiae of the author's own life from The Silver Dove, to Petersburg, to the three interconnected works Kotik Letaev, The Baptized Chinaman (which deal with periods of time from Bely's infancy and early childhood), and Notes of an Eccentric (which, although very digressive, revolves around one episode from his adulthood). The works after Petersburg are actually quite difficult to classify since they resemble closely Bely's "official" three volumes of memoirs. And what is most interesting, near the end of his life, while working on the continuation of his last volume of memoirs, Bely actually contemplated uniting the forms of the novel and the memoir. 22 Indeed, the three works after Petersburg were conceived as parts of a vast, multivolume opus tellingly entitled My Life. The provisional title for the first part was I. An Epic, and Bely's plans called for a total of ten volumes. Nothing but early fragments of the entire work were ever completed, of course. 23 The question of narrative strategy broadly conceived is thus central to all of Bely's belles lettres, with the first-person point of view being the constant attraction. -9In The Silver Dove, the style of the narrative is strongly influenced by Gogol, as Bely acknowledged openly, and as has often been repeated in the criticism. 24 Although regularly shifting to the third-person, the narrative voice in the novel also ranges from the folksy skaz of Gogol's Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka to the lyrical digressions of Dead Souls. This very variety of first-person voices has been problematic for some readers, who have difficulty reconciling the chatty style of a hospitable denizen from Tselebeevo with the visionary, impassioned pae-

96

Andrei Bely

ans of a more sophisticated narrator, or his easy movement into, and merging with the consciousnesses of different characters. 25 By the standards of most nineteenth-century novels, the different narrative voices represent a fragmentation of what is expected to be a unitary point of view. This criticism clearly touches on the related theoretical problem of how to reconcile the privileged symbolistic perceptions of the narrator—understood as stemming from or imitating authentic cognitive experiences—with the feigned ones of characters in all of Bely s narratives. But although this problem is not really resolved satisfactorily in The Silver Dove, it is interesting to speculate how to make sense of the narrative dimension of the novel and coordinate it with Bely's views. There is no evidence that Bely ever found the narrative side of any of his works problematic (except for the Fourth Symphony). However, his metaliterary digressions in Petersburg indirectly raise the issue of how to understand the works preceding it. Shifts in point of view can be understood as an inevitable consequence of Bely's symbolic method when it is applied to a narrative prose work that contains characters as well as a narrator. Since symbolic perceptions involve an individual's interaction with his surrounding world, and since such perceptions are meant to provide unmediated glimpses of a spiritual reality, the perceptions cannot really be described if they are to be at all convincing, but have to be dramatized as each person's own cognitive acts. The narrative consciousness must therefore move into characters' minds and see the way they do, even if this means the temporary eclipsing of the reigning, unique narrative voice. Bely does this often with Petr, as well as with several of the other major characters. And in this he is simply using more extensively the narrative device of "free indirect discourse" that is common in the nineteenth-century novel (Tolstoy's narrators even merge with animals). Furthermore, as Karlinsky has pointed out, the narrator's voice is everywhere appropriate to the characters who dominate a particular section of the novel. 26 It is as if Bely had his narrator imitate different character types in order to be in harmony with their particular minds and ways of thinking and seeing. In my discussion of the Second Symphony I suggested that the rapid shifts in point of view that occur in that work, when combined, produce a composite picture of a multidimensional world. The same tactic operates in The Silver Dove and in the later novels. Bely's different narrative voices can be understood as a reflection of his symbolistic world view in which material phenomena occupy only one level in a complex universe that also contains planes of spiritual reality. The different voices might thus be seen as belonging to individuals who are vouch-

The Silver Dove

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 worlds—that 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 worlds—there, 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

It is the influence of Soloviev's teaching about Divine Wisdom that leads Bely to identify mystical love (and to mention Plato and Böhme) as the mediating agent between heaven and earth. This is the context within which his comments about the absence of adequate love themes in Gogol's work should be understood. Bely's image of Gogol as narrator thus easily embraces both the folksy and the visionary voices of the narrator in The Silver Dove. Gogol is of course not an ideally holistic consciousness. However, Bely does not fault him for the range in his narrative voices, but for the absence of an esoteric wisdom that would adequately account for the connection between matter and spirit. And this is precisely what The Silver Dove offers in its intertwined theurgic and Solovievian themes, and in the essentially Christian faith in the restoration of a fallen world to God after the Second Coming that is implied in the narrator s paean ending with the image of the resurrected Fire-Bird. The relevance of the essay for understanding the narrative form of The Silver Dove is further supported by Bely's identification of a certain characteristic of Gogol's style—one that grows out of Bely's view that Gogol's two "Is" were split. This distinctive feature is a type of dualistic symbolic perception identical to the one in the novel. Bely cites an example from Gogol's "Old World Landowners" that is like the "blue abyss of day" in The Silver Dove's first paragraph: "a horrible silence during a cloudless day." In Bely's view, this is a perception of the "daylight approach of the abyss of the spirit to the surface of daylight consciousness"—a perception characteristic of "highly enlightened mystics." In a similar vein, Bely finds an ominous image of someone's frightening, flickering shadow in Gogol's story "ATerrible Vengeance," when on a sunny, cloudless day there appears "the shadow of a horrible provocation that comes from the depths of the soul, from the depths of the earth." 30 Bely's eccentric but assiduous study of Gogol thus appears to have fed directly into The Silver Dove and to have helped shape much of the narrative's verbal texture, including its dualistic perceptions. The range in narrative voices in the novel emerges as Bely's deliberate attempt to dramatize what he saw as Gogol's epistemological stance, but with the difference that in The Silver Dove heaven and earth will be united in the apocalypse. It is striking, however, that Bely does not supply his narrator with any independent, apodictic statements about the apocalypse or the Second Coming, as he would in Petersburg, or as he did, somewhat less stridently, in the Second Symphony. The narrator s paean in The Silver Dove to the world-wide conflagration that will follow the grafting of

The Silver

Dove

99

the West onto Russia is an instance of free indirect discourse, blending with Darialsky's musings. The narrator's laconism about the author's own fervent beliefs may be due to Bely's desire to be a "consistent" Symbolist—to avoid presenting any insights that greatly exceed those of characters. On the other hand, the widespread dualistic perceptions of the narrator are small proto-apocalyptic insights that still go beyond the abilities of the characters; and it is not at all clear by the end of the work that Kudeiarov, Schmidt, or Darialsky grasp the true eschatological nature of the events in which they are involved. This may be yet another instance of the narrator's predilection for leaving lacunae in his tale for the purpose of drawing the reader into it—a time-honored device in the history of narrative. The most obvious example is Darialsky's fate, which is subtly adumbrated many times in various ways by the narrator and characters (there is a recurring song that can be heard in the distance about a "young fellow" who has "perished forever") without being fully revealed until the very end. Another example is the whole matter of the Doves slowly poisoning Eropegin. Hints about this are dropped a number of times (I, 51: 39; I, 85: 65; II, 50: 267), but the reader has to conclude for himself what is going on because the narrator does not tell him. Withholding information makes obvious sense from the point of view of fictional devices designed to hold the reader's attention and to involve him in the text; and in a way, the novel is a murder mystery. Obliqueness is of course also preferable to directness because it allows for subtler effects achieved through a play with the reader's imagination. Moreover, the narrator's reticence, and the reader's consequent involvement in making sense of the perceptions dramatized in this extremely visual novel, makes the reader into something like an initiate into the higher mysteries of existence. In an oft-quoted remark in Notes of an Eccentric, Bely speaks of "every novel [being] a game of hide and seek with the reader . . . the sole significance of the architectonics, of the phrase, is to avert the reader's eye from the sacred point: the genesis of myth." 31 This tendency becomes even stronger in Petersburg, and must be understood in relation to the special truth-value and ontologica! weight that verbal art has for Bely.

Petersburg 3 As above, so below. Hermes Trismegistus, Tabula Smaragdina

Petersburg (first published serially in 1913-14; second edition, 1922; third, 1928) represents the summit of Bely's art—indeed, one of the peaks of twentieth-century literature as a whole. 1 W h a t makes Bely's second novel so remarkable is what distinguishes every great modern literary w o r k — t h e uniqueness of the world embodied in it, and the originality of the means employed to present this world to the reader. Although neither the texture nor the appearance of the narrative is that of any familiar poetic form, Petersburg is ideally approached as one vast poem because of the intricate density of the text. In addition to such traditional features of the novel as characters, plot, imagery, and the narrator's relation to his story and to his author—all of which Bely interconnects with a seeming infinity of echoes—punctuation, rhythm, and sound orchestration are also central to Petersburg.2 M y task, however, will continue to be limited to defining the central trunk of Bely's world view, and certain characteristic formal features that grow out of it. The basic plot line in Petersburg is simple. The time is the 1905 Revolution, and the place is the Imperial Russian capital, St. Petersburg. Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, a student of Kantian philosophy, makes a rash promise to a revolutionary group to assassinate his father, Apollon Apollonovich, a senator and high-ranking bureaucrat in one of the ministries. The famous revolutionary Dudkin, living clandestinely in the city, gives Nikolai a time bomb to use against his father. This b o m b goes off near the end of the novel, but without harming anyone. An important subplot involves Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, the delightfully flighty wife of a junior officer in a guards' regiment, and once the object of Nikolai's unrequited advances. In fact, it was a sublimated

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 itself—in the form of vast, troubling vistas and agitated street scenes—swells 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 work—much more than is usually the case—in 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 produces—that 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.

102

Andrei Bely

Although a frenzied but ultimately serious tone dominates the work, it also has extended passages of masterful comedy, farce, and satire, especially in the first edition. This feature recalls the Second Symphony and The Silver Dove, but Bely s humor is much more effective in Petersburg. As in the earlier works, however, humor and satire in Petersburg are variants of "philosophical irony"—Bely's way of suggesting the distance between imperfect man and the otherworldly realm, which man can hold dear even though he falls short of it. Many of the themes and devices in Petersburg were prefigured in Bely's earlier works, even if only The Silver Dove begins to approach his achievement in the second novel. I mentioned above that Petersburg was originally conceived as a continuation of the earlier novel (Bely even referred to it as "The Dove" in his letters to Blok before he settled on the final title with Viacheslav Ivanov's help). As a result, the first edition of Petersburg contained a number of echoes of the plot of The Silver Dove. But after Bely abridged the novel, what remains in the 1922 and 1928 editions is quite minor. It includes the narrator's passing mention of a clipping from a St. Petersburg newspaper of October 1905 that reports a theft of diamonds and the disappearance of a writer from a provincial town (I, 77: 37). This is a reference to the Baroness Todrabe Graaben's diamonds, which, according to her son, were stolen by General Chizhikov and not by Darialsky, the "writer" mentioned in the clipping. The minor character Stepka, the Tselebeevo shopkeepers son, turns up in St. Petersburg after we had seen him leaving the village in The Silver Dove, and brings with him stories of the Doves' apocalyptic plans (I, 128: 67). And a tiny reminder of the theme of the Doves is the "silver dove" ornament on the helmet of Baron Ommergau, a minor character in Petersburg (1,140: 73). -2-

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 method—and the conception of man's tie to the transcendent that underlies it—the 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

cant developments in his conception of symbolism, were written in haste, and the three volumes do not present a methodical exposition of a system of thought. 4 One of the major problems in trying to make sense of the essays is that Bely repeatedly returned to the same questions, but often on different levels of abstraction, and using widely different terminologies that he never reconciled. There are also fundamental discrepancies among the essays, and to confuse the matter further, different essays stress different aspects of his theory. Despite all these real problems, however, by the end of the decade two fundamental principles of Bely s theory of symbolism emerge fairly clearly. The first is that symbolism stresses the primacy of creation over cognition, a formulation found in his earliest essays and that continues to be central in the latest ones as well. 5 More specifically, he states that without the act of creation there is only "dead data" (mertvye dannosti) making up "the primeval Chaos out of which worlds arise." Although the world the artist creates by underscoring the fundamental traits in "an image of the visible" may seem unreal, it is in fact true to a higher reality that is discovered through the creative process. 6 In the major essay "The Emblematics of Meaning" (1909), which comes as close as Bely ever got to writing a complete theory of symbolism, he actually argues that the world of "empirical reality" has no a priori existence; that even "particles, forces and ions" are products of a creative cognitive process. 7 And in another formulation from 1909, which follows a very different path but comes to effectively the same result, Bely implies that the "objective world" may not be knowable even though it may exist in some form: "by naming things we . . . summon them out of the darkness of the unknown." 8 A similar idea is expressed in "The Magic of Words" (1909), which has special relevance for Petersburg. This important essay examines the nature of language, and also touches on the related problem of the ontological status of the artist-perceiver vis-a-vis the world outside him. Bely argues that naming a thing with a word causes that thing to come into existence. All knowledge stems from naming, and knowing is impossible without words: before one can know something, that thing has to be defined, or, in effect, created with words—but with the difference that in this schema the creative artifact is verbal and not "an image" taken from nature. Bely specifically stresses the acoustic dimension of language: the word creates a "third world" of "sound symbols, by means of which the mysteries of the world outside me as well as those within me are illuminated." Fluidity characterizes the creation of verbal symbols, for, as Bely says of himself, the writer pours some aspect of his inner nature (ultimately deriving, one assumes, from the transcendent) into the outside and the outside pours into him. Without

104

Andrei Bely

this interpénétration, 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, he—are one, . . .

Petersburg

105

father, mother and son—are 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 Valéry 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

106

Andrei Bely

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 Dörnach, Switzerland, from 1914 to 1916. And despite

Petersburg

107

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 anthroposophy—and whom he visited soon after becoming Steiners follower—commented 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

108

Andrei Bely

transcendent, and abounding in concrete images that he could readily utilize because of their inherently picturesque or atmospheric nature. The broad concepts of Bely's theoretical essays on symbolism thus found resonance in the "ready made," tangible imagery and beliefs of anthroposophy. Most of Bely's borrowings were from Steiner s conception of how the individual actually comes to know the transcendent—the heart of the problem, as it were—although Bely departed significantly from the spirit of anthroposophy by making his characters the unwitting victims of the spiritual world rather than self-conscious adepts exploring it. Steiner did allow "spontaneous" initiation into the mysteries of existence for select individuals, but generally stressed the difficulty of the path that had to be followed by human beings desiring enlightenment. By involving all his characters in occult experiences Bely betrayed the principle of free will that anthroposophy teaches (a principle that is automatically problematic in any teleological metaphysics, as Calvinism illustrates in the context of Christianity). But at the same time he was simply being consistent with his own strongly deterministic views as expressed in his earlier belletristic works. What does an investigation of Bely's anthroposophical borrowings in Petersburg add to an understanding of the novel? The most important aspect of this connection is that it bolsters an occult reading of the work and helps to explain certain repeating images that would otherwise remain enigmatic. An awareness of Steiner's influence on Petersburg adds weight to the argument against understanding the novel as a mere metaphor for Bely's own purely psychological quandaries. 30 This is not to say that there is no psychological dimension in the novel; clearly, there is. Bely's presentation of his characters' psychologies is overwhelmingly convincing and extraordinarily nuanced. But to deny a metaphysical basis for the psychological dimension of the work is to decapitate Bely by ignoring the organizing principle behind his conception of psychological states. As Bely put it himself, "all of Petersburg is saturated with anthroposophy, and especially in the striking psychological passages."31 A neat formulation of the relation between an individual's psychological state and the cosmos can be found in a letter Bely wrote from Dornach in 1914 in which he speaks of the overpowering sensation of apocalyptic dread that he and other contemporaries experienced: "I understood that the reasons that cause this net (a net of spiritual alarm) to arise before one's eyes are found in the depth of individual consciousness; but the depths of consciousness rest in the universal, cosmic unity [vselenskoe edinstvo]."32 But Bely's debt to anthroposophy will become

Petersburg

109

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 reality—a central preoccupation in the novel as a whole. It thus becomes possible to examine moments of symbolic cognition—scenes in which characters perceive and come to know something—from 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 shadow—the 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 reality—an 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

110

Andrei Bely

question of his own state of being: whose "cerebral play" produces him? As it happens, Bely makes no attempt to differentiate himself from the narrator in Petersburg. Quite the opposite is true. Consequently, one can infer that the concept "idle cerebral play" is meant to bridge somehow the gap between the fictional world within the novel and the real world outside it. The narrator's purpose in the rest of the section is to convince the reader of precisely this radical view—that the traditional distinction between fiction and reality has been erased. He says of the senator: "And granting that Apollon Apollonovich is spun from our brain, nonetheless he will manage to inspire fear with another, a stupendous state of being which attacks in the night." The section ends with an even more strident repetition of this claim: "The aged senator will, oh yes, he will, pursue you too, dear reader . . . And henceforth you will never ever forget him!" The same reality is granted to the other products of cerebral play, even though they are spawned on a different level in the hierarchical series. The "stranger" whom the senator's brain produced "really exists" because "thought exists" (literally: "possesses a reality of its own" in the 1928 edition of the novel). What the narrator says about cerebral play itself, although somewhat cryptic, is highly suggestive. In characteristic fashion, he begins by referring to himself as "the author," which implies in this context that he does not view his text as being "fiction" in the usual sense of the word. He says that he might as well disavow the illusions he created in the first chapter because they are merely the product of "unnecessary, idle cerebral play." Of course, he is being completely ironic, for, as he immediately adds, "Cerebral play is only a mask. Under way beneath this mask is the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us [1928: 'by a variety of forces']." This last statement is central for understanding the world Bely has created in Petersburg, as well as for establishing the relation between this digression and his theoretical essays. That Bely also attributed crucial importance to the concept "cerebral play" is clear from his having considered entitling the novel Cerebral play.33 In effect, the narratorauthor has posited the existence of forces that invade human consciousness (or that may be human consciousness) under the guise of independent personal cogitations and create the individuals and things that comprise the world. These occult forces seem to have the same function in Petersburg, therefore, that the Symbol (as distinct from symbols) has in Bely's theory of symbolism. By not saying more about the forces, Bely is actually being consistent with his unavoidable silence about what constitutes the mysterious Symbol. But just as it is possible to find

Petersburg

111

references in his essays to a Solovievian eschatology—which seems to be the one visible face of the Absolute in Bely s schema—there are numerous indications in the novel of what these occult forces are. Much of this chapter will be concerned with an examination of Bely's text for evidence of a transcendent unity underlying the seemingly independent cognitive acts of individuals. 34 The narrator-author's reference to cerebral play acting through him as well as his characters is also very important for understanding how Petersburg constitutes a resolution of the theoretical problem that has troubled Bely's narratives since the First Symphony. For the first time, Bely provides an omnipotent higher unity that acts through the narrator-author to create both his text and his entire world. Thus the perceptions that the "lyrical" narrator-author is vouchsafed can be reconciled with the sections of the text presented from the third person because both are ultimately reifications of the occult forces for which cerebral play is a mask. The first-person narrator's perceptions, as embodied in the text, and the characters with their experiences are all symbolic of the higher unity that determines everything that is. The assumption that some higher reality is behind cerebral play may also explain why the narrator refers to the individuals spawned by it as "shadows." Bely's world-view has neo-Platonic features (although his conception of art is the opposite of Plato's), and the references to shadows bring to mind the "myth of the cave" passages in Book VII of Plato's Republic. Of course, shadows of the ideal Platonic forms are shadows only to those who know the ideal forms; for everyone else (the ignorant multitude) they are the real things of this world. A comparable double viewpoint may be at work in the narrator's statements about specific characters and things elsewhere in the novel, where individuals and objects alternate between being shadows in one scene and not in another. On the one hand, the narrator has insight into the higher reality, from which point of view aspects of this world are shadows. But on the other hand, the narrator is also a man and, from the human point of view (like that of most of the characters much of the time), the shadows seem to be real things. An abrupt shifting back and forth between these two points of view—similar to Bely's style in the Second Symphony and, ultimately, a reflection of his metaphysics—contributes much to the nervous narrative texture of the novel. Other major aspects of Bely's theory of symbolism are also discernible in the narrator's digression quoted above. His description of thoughts taking on a life of their own outside their thinkers' minds is a variation on the fundamental thesis that creation has primacy over cognition: beings and things are created by cerebral play before they become known by the perceivers. This is also a further development of

112

Andrei Bely

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" state—ready 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

Petersburg

113

Be that as it may, in one of his best-known treatises Steiner describes "living thoughts" in a way strongly resembling several of Bely s seminal formulations (which, it should be remembered, he published before he became an anthroposophist). Speaking of a dimension of the "spiritual world," Steiner explains that thoughts must be imagined as living, independent entities. What is apprehended as thoughts in the physical world is like the shadow of what exists in the land of spirits as thought beings. If we imagine thought, as it exists in human beings, withdrawn from man and endowed as an active entity with its own inner life, then we have a feeble illustration of what permeates the fourth region of the spirit land. What man perceives as thoughts in his physical world between birth and death is only the manifestation of the thought world as it is able to express itself through the instrumentality of the bodies. But all such thoughts entertained by human beings, which signify an enrichment of the physical world, have their origin in this region. 37 The narrator's digression at the end of Chapter I seems based on exactly such formulations. Moreover, the published version of one of Steiner's best-known lectures that he gave in 1911 has a sketch he drew showing the movement of "living beings on the Astral Plane" into a human head where "shadow-images" of these beings are reflected as thinking.38 Bely clearly embroidered on Steiner's ideas by reifying "thought beings" into characters. However, this is more an imaginative collation of Steiner's ideas about "thought beings" with other notions of his about "tone beings" (see below), rather than a betrayal of the spirit of anthroposophy. The epithets "idle" and "unnecessary" that the narrator attaches to "cerebral play," to say nothing of "play" itself, reflect the irony of the situation the narrator describes in the digression. On the one hand, he is speaking about the fundamental creative force in the world of the novel. On the other, this creative force acts through individuals who are completely oblivious to what is really happening through them. The situation is ultimately one that Bely takes seriously, but it was quite in keeping with his character to be (philosophically) ironic about matters that he took closest to heart, as he made amply clear in earlier works, particularly the Second Symphony. In Petersburg, as before, the point of Bely's irony is to underscore that he recognizes the distance separating mankind from the realm of spirit in which he believes, and not to question the validity of that belief. The narrator's insistence on the continuity between the reader's world and the world of the novel, which hinges on his implication that cerebral play exists outside the novel, also has roots in Bely's theoreti-

114

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" text—one 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 novel—that 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,

Petersburg

115

of separate intrusions of a given thought into individual consciousnesses—a 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

116

Andrei Bely

of a character being unaffected by a message from the beyond occurs in one scene when the senator, walking through a seedy part of the city, is struck by the idea that "they" hate him, meaning the revolutionaries. He suspects that they are only an insignificant little band, at which point cerebral play immediately intrudes to erect before him a gigantic map of Russia. Apollon Apollonovich is forced to wonder if the entire mass of the Empire's inhabitants is in fact his enemy (I, 252: 139). This illumination does not change his reactionary policies, but it does suggest that he is a small part of a larger historical process, which, in turn, is linked to a transcendent realm. Apollon Apollonovich's son Nikolai has comparable experiences, but the narrator uses a different expression when referring to the thoughts that intrude into his mind. Nikolai's attempted patricide is, of course, the mainspring of the novel's plot. Well into the story, the narrator asks if Nikolai was capable of conceiving by himself the plan to kill his father. A dozen lines later he answers his own question: "No, no!" because "there were swarms of thoughts thinking themselves [sebia mysliashchie my sii]; and it was not he thinking, but thoughts thinking themselves" (II, 143: 218). Although this phenomenon is not called cerebral play, it seems identical. It also recalls Darialsky's agitation in The Silver Dove, when such thoughts invade him too. Moreover, just like the senator who "remembers" that he had seen Dudkin earlier, a few lines after the narrator's comments about the thoughts thinking themselves Nikolai "realizes" that he is the author of the plan to assassinate his father. The reader remembers, of course, that before the start of the novel Nikolai had made an offer to a group of terrorists to assassinate his father (I, 51, 100: 23, 50). But in Bely's schema this again means that the thought had been implanted in him earlier still. The narrator says that this thought from some realm outside Nikolai "burst" in his soul. This seemingly insignificant detail is an echo of the important explosion symbol in Petersburg (the bomb Nikolai is supposed to use against his father is only one of the manifestations of the symbol), which is ultimately a reflection of the apocalypse totally dominating the world in the novel. Support for the inference that "cerebral play" and "self-thinking thoughts" are identical, and that they indicate a transcendent force acting through the human mind, can be found in a letter Bely wrote to a friend after attending Steiners "secret" lectures in 1912-13. Bely speaks of "thoughts thinking themselves" being the "oscillation" of the individual's "etheric body" (one of the spiritual components of the human being, according to Steiner). On the basis of anthroposophical teaching, Bely also affirms that "the world is created anew out of nothing" (pre-

Petersburg

117

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

118

Andrei Bely

bomb is in the house, but Nikolai still manages to convince himself of the nonsensical nature of these self-thinking thoughts. Of course, shortly thereafter the bomb explodes—disproving him convincingly (II, 256-259: 285-287). The third major character in the novel is Dudkin, a revolutionary, who, at least on the surface, seems to be the antithesis of the reactionary senator. But like Apollon Apollonovich and his son, Dudkin is also subject to the intrusion of self-thinking thoughts. For example, on his way to deliver the bomb to Nikolai, Dudkin stops in a cheap restaurant which happens to be decorated with a mural of one of Peter the Great s naval battles. As Dudkin sits there, "thoughts were thinking themselves láumy dumalis'samij" (I, 42:18). In this instance, Bely uses a different Russian word for "thought" from the one he used in the passage about Nikolai. Yet the effect is the same. The thoughts produce an image before Dudkin of a strangely familiar-looking workman with a pipe against a dock-like background. This seemingly insignificant "picture" shows what portentous messages can be concealed in small details in Petersburg: later in the novel it becomes obvious that this workman is one of the avatars of Peter the Great, who, in turn, is one of the most important symbols in the book, and who has special meaning for Dudkin in particular. The juxtaposition of the mural and Dudkin s "picture" reveals to the reader the extent to which the novel is saturated with historical forces that are linked to the transcendent. It is Dudkin's experience with intruding thoughts that offers the most elaborate and probably the most revealing example in the novel. Dudkin has been told that someone is looking for him, but when he returns to his attic he promises himself that he will not be afraid, because "Anything that might happen was only cerebral play" (II, 112: 202). It is an indication of Dudkin's unusual perspicacity among the novel's characters that he is sufficiently aware of such "play" to try to dismiss it. However, the irony in his comment is entirely at his own expense. Shortly after he returns home, Dudkin is confronted by a strange visitor. Although Shishnarfne seems to be three-dimensional at first, as Dudkin speaks to him, his visitor becomes a two-dimensional silhouette and finally a voice coming out of Dudkin's own throat (II, 118-121: 205207). Shishnarfne's "disappearance" is a striking illustration in reverse of the mental creation of reality the narrator discussed at the end of Chapter I. Rather than have Shishnarfne leap into being from Dudkin's head, we see Shishnarfne withdraw into his throat. It is as if Bely wanted to show how the forces that cerebral play "masks" return from the terrestrial plane to their transcendent origin through a human agent.

Petersburg

119

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

120

Andrei Bely

the fourth dimension which is not indicated on maps, which is indicated merely by a dot. And this dot is the place where the plane of being is tangential to the surface of the sphere of the immense astral cosmos. A dot which in the twinkling of an eye can produce for us an inhabitant of the fourth dimension, from whom not even a wall can protect us. (II, 121: 207) It is an important detail that the minor character Stepka takes fright at Shishnarfne's appearance and says: "Well, if this sort has taken to dropping in, a Prayer Book's of no earthly use. This sort doesn't drop in on just anybody" (II, 117: 205). Stepka's words prove that Shishnarfne is not an illusion, or a mere hallucination of Dudkin's as some have argued.44 Another significant aspect of this scene is that it contains a rare continuum between the dramatization of the transcendent intruding into the earthly world, and a rather elaborate indication of what the transcendent may be. Most often in the novel, Bely stresses only one and hints at the other. During their conversation, Shishnarfne repeats certain ideas that Dudkin once preached in Helsingfors, but later abandoned—namely, that it is necessary to hasten the collapse of Western civilization and summon the Mongols (II, 115: 203). Even though Dudkin may have renounced these views, they still resemble closely one aspect of the narrator's own apocalyptic conception of history, which I shall treat at length below. Thus Shishnarfne also has the benefit of the narrator's implicit support, and Dudkin is shown to have had insight into the grand process underlying the world of the novel. Before turning to an examination of this transcendent process, I would like to look into the role of cerebral play in the life of the narrator-author. His digression implied that he was subject to the same mysterious forces that intrude into his characters, and this is indeed the case. The best illustration is the narrator's apostrophe to the city, which interrupts the scene of Nikolai being badgered by the agent-provocateur Morkovin in a cheap restaurant. Immediately after Morkovin asks Nikolai a question, 45 the narrator exclaims: Petersburg, Petersburg! Precipitating out as fog, you have pursued me with cerebral play. Cruel-hearted tormentor! Restless specter! For years you have attacked me. I have run along the horrible Prospects, to land with a flying leap on this very same gleaming bridge . . . O, green waters, teeming with germs! I remember that fateful moment: on a September night I too leaned over the deep railing . . . (II, 21:148)

Petersburg

121

The narrator-author's cri de coeur is a drastic change in subject matter and point of view, and thus functions as an intrusion into the scene between the two characters on the levels of both form and content. The theme of the intrusive passage, however, is the same as in the preceding scene with Morkovin and Nikolai—persecution and coercion. The narrator-author's reference to the city as pursuing him, and his perception of it as a precipitate out of fog, recall his speaking of characters as shadows in the end of Chapter I. From one point of view, therefore, the city is the narrator-author's "creation," and like "shadowy" Dudkin, who will pursue the senator, the city will pursue the narrator-author. But the reader has learned from Shishnarfne that St. Petersburg straddles the boundary between the world of matter and spirit and has a spiritual "fourth dimension." Thus the city is both artificer and artifact—it is part of the transcendent realm from which creative forces enter the narrator as cerebral play, and is itself the product of this cerebral play. And the narrator-author can say that the "spectral" city "torments" him because he is aware that the transcendent forces that create the city are using him for their own ends. The near-suicide "on a September night" which the narrator mentions serves to erase the distinction between the narrator and author in the same way that the narrator's comments did in his metacognitive digression. The narrator-author does not explain this mysterious reference anywhere in the novel. But as Bely reveals in his memoirs, this apostrophe to St. Petersburg, as well as other details in the novel, are recollections of his own distraught state in September of 1906, which had been brought about by the rebuff he had received from Liubov Dmitrievna Blok, the poet's wife. Once again, therefore, Bely is stepping across the boundary between the novel's world and the world of the reader as if the two were continuous. 46 Bely's description of the novel's genesis in his memoirs lends additional support to this inference. In a fragment that was published posthumously, he recalls that when he was trying to decide how to continue The Silver Dove and to visualize Senator Ableukhov, he suddenly heard the prolonged sound "u," as in the English "moon." To this sound (subsequently appearing in the novel as an ominous background noise), became attached a motif from Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades (which is also invoked in the novel), and then immediately there flared up before me a picture of the Neva . . . a light blue silvery night and the square of the black carriage . . . it was as though I began to run after the carriage in my thoughts, trying to make out the one sitting in it. . . out of the carriage leapt the little figure of the senator, exactly as I had sketched it in the

122

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 inspiration—for that is what seems to lie behind his recollections of the novel's birth—resembles 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

Petersburg

123

of the St. Petersburg Islands a "crowd of shadows," the narrator also stresses that the city's inhabitants become shadows, or that the city's streets transform them into shadows (I, 35, 39, 49: 13, 16, 22, and so on). Since they inhabit a dualistic city, it is appropriate for the citizens to "flicker" between being fully present in the "plane of being" and not. 5 1 It is like the disappearance of Shishnarfne repeated many times over, but with the usual difference that there is no question of it happening through their own volition. The question of the tie between the city and its inhabitants is also one that serves well to illustrate the nature of Bely s abridgement of the first version of the novel. Since he simply deleted numerous passages (adding a word or two only very rarely), several themes and image clusters either disappeared or became muted in the later version. For example, speaking of the deleterious influence of the Flying Dutchman on the Russian people (an important symbol of transcendent creative will), the narrator had originally explained that "During long years the orthodox folk caroused here with the spectre: a bastard race came off the islands—neither people, nor shadows—settling on the border between the two worlds that are alien to each other" (1916: p. 13). Similar formulations had also appeared elsewhere in the novel. Moreover, the theme of bastardry was linked to an image of "hellish dives" on the St. Petersburg Islands, which was also deleted from the later version of the novel. The effect of these cuts was to make the author s remaining comments more elliptical and the unstable, flickering "islanders" even more elusive by virtue of the fact that their origins become more mysterious. In turn, this forces the reader to a greater involvement in making sense of the text. -5In addition to embodying his coercive world view in the thematics and in the texture of the prose, Bely also dramatizes it by means of a highly original typographical device that appears often in Petersburg. This is a series of twenty-eight passages scattered throughout the novel whose left margin has been moved toward the center of the page, producing an indention. The depths of the indentions vary from seven to twenty spaces (whereas the first line of a paragraph is indented only three). Several passages have additional indentions a few spaces deep within the primary ones, producing a steplike arrangement. In a number of cases, the passages are separated by only a few lines of normally printed text, and comprise one continuous unit in terms of content. The passages range in length from one line to seventeen, with seven being the average. When Bely cut the original text of the novel by between one-fourth and one-third to produce the 1922 edition, he deleted only

124

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

Petersburg

125

had been nothing. Such a conception of the Dutchman's and Peter's roles is also clearly a variation on the theme of thoughts taking on a life of their own outside the thinker's head. And, as a symbol of Peter, the Dutchman acquires the aura of the world-historical forces still acting in contemporary Russia two centuries after Peter. Through this association the Dutchman also foreshadows the Bronze Horseman's intrusive flow into Dudkin's veins. In sum, the first indented passage is a brilliant epitome of the coercive world view embodied in Petersburg as a whole. Equally significant is the indented passage dealing with Dudkin's approach to Lippanchenko's house (II, 211: 259). Since Dudkin is under the Bronze Horseman's influence and plans to murder Lippanchenko, this passage invokes the same forces as the ones at work in the passage about the Flying Dutchman. There are also three indented passages dealing with the "white domino," which is the Christ symbol in the novel (I, 217, 219, II, 107:118, 119, 198). Even when this elusive figure appears in passages that are not embayed, its relationship with the novel's characters has an intrusive nature. In different scenes the white domino seems to usurp the identity of Likhutin (I, 217: 118), a policeman on the street (I, 229: 125), a certain "Misha" (II, 107: 198), and Nikolai Ableukhov (II, 146: 220). Where they do occur, the indentions on the page echo this sudden movement of a divine force into the personas of the characters. The white domino also recalls the red domino that Nikolai dons to terrorize Sofia Petrovna. Both costumes recall the narrator-author's explanation at the end of Chapter I that "cerebral play" is a "mask" for intrusive forces. Quite obviously, the white domino is also an adumbration of the end point of Bely's Solovievian teleology—the defeat of the Antichrist and the Second Coming. But since the forces of evil—the pan-Mongolian harbingers of the coming Antichrist—are temporarily on the ascendant, it is fitting that for the time being the Christ figure should appear as pale and impotent. Thus, these indented passages can also be seen to function as microcosms of the novel's macrocosmos. There is one cluster of three overtly metaliterary indented passages that appear on one page and are linked internally (II, 223: 265). The "author" speaks in them of the relativity of time, and of his having got lost in the "spiritual spaces" of his characters. On the one hand, this unmasking of the author's presence in an indented passage reflects his seeming suzerainty over the text; on the other, his revelation of impotence before time and the spiritual dimensions that lie behind his characters raises doubts that he is really in control of what he is writing. The three passages can be understood, therefore, as a reminder of the author's awareness that he is the spiritual realm's amanuensis.

126

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 passages—expressive of comparable cosmic intrusions—appear in works Bely wrote after Petersburg, including Kotik Letaev, Notes of an Eccentric, and The Baptized Chinaman.52 -6-

Despite the abundant formal and thematic evidence in Petersburg for the inference that Bely saw himself as something akin to the transcendent's agent or tool, Bely the historical author appears to his readers as one who used language in a deliberate and highly original manner. With a sufficiently deterministic world view, it is of course possible to see literally every human deed as being controlled by an otherworldly realm. From such a viewpoint, an unusually inventive use of language may be less the result of an original mind's individual effort than evidence of inspiration from the beyond. This is a matter that cannot be resolved. Perhaps the most useful approach would simply be to examine the metalinguistic dimension of Petersburg—what Bely implies about language in it—without trying to pass final judgment on the author's underlying views. The importance of this theme is signaled by the novel's opening with an implicit question about the adequacy of language for the definition of reality: Your Excellencies, Your Worships, Your Honors, and Citizens! What is this Russian Empire of ours? This Russian Empire of ours is a geographic entity, which means: part of a certain planet. And this Russian Empire includes: in the first place—Great, Little, White, and Red Rus; in the second place—the Kingdoms of Georgia, Poland, Kazan, and Astrakhan; in the third place, it includes . . . But—et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. (1,11:1)

Petersburg

127

Here Bely's narrator demonstrates the uselessness of the conventional, chancery language of official documents by posing a crucial question of world-historical dimensions and then, in effect, failing to answer it (in a voice that recalls a Gogolian skaz). The ellipses following the list of kingdoms that are part of the Empire suggest that in frustration he abandons this particular linguistic line of approach in defining what the Russian Empire is. The narrator then turns to listing the types of cities that are found in the Empire, which leads him to the differences between St. Petersburg and Moscow. By using conventional categories and terms, and by relying on a humorous, simple-minded, and most important, an eminently logical language, the narrator comes to the (intentionally) absurd conclusion that St. Petersburg does not exist: But if you continue to insist on the utterly preposterous legend about the existence of a Moscow population of a million-and-ahalf, then you will have to admit that the capital is Moscow, for only capitals have a population of a million-and-a-half . . . And in conformance with this preposterous legend, it will be apparent that the capital is not Petersburg. But if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist. (I, 12-13: 2) The narrator gets equally tangled up in his attempts to define Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg by using language conventionally and logically. He twice breaks off his definition of it because the linguistic means he is employing fail him: "The houses that form its lateral limits are—hmmm . . . yes: . . . for the public"; likewise, "Nevsky Prospect is rectilineal (just between us), because it is a European prospect; and any European prospect is not merely a prospect, but (as I have already said) a prospect that is European, because . . . yes . . . " The Prologue ends with the narrator's conclusion that St. Petersburg does indeed exist, although, significantly, what defines it as existent is language. Anticipating Shishnarfne's description of Petersburg as being the point of contact between terrestrial and otherworldly realms, the narrator describes the capital as it appears on maps: in the form of two small circles . . . with a black dot in the center; and from precisely this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from here, from this very point surges and swarms the printed book; from this invisible point speeds the official circular. The rest of Petersburg is de facto Bely's answer to the question with which he begins the Prologue. Thus, in the context of the novel as a

128

Andrei Bely

whole, the Prologue emerges as an instance of Bely's ironic treatment of the problem of romantic irony. Although the locus of the novel's action is the capital city and its spiritual dimensions, St. Petersburg is clearly a synecdoche for the Russian Empire as a whole (the continuity of concerns between this novel and The Silver Dove, which takes place in the provinces, supports such an inference). The form Bely's definition of the reality of Russia takes is his highly unconventional and antilogical, or better to say, poetic use of language. The inadequacy of received, established, and "worn out" language— as Bely described it in the essay "The Magic of Words"—is a theme that recurs in the body of the novel as well. The fundamental problem with conventionally used language is its ability to generate a false world that acts as a screen of illusions separating the individual from true reality. Apollon Apollonovich's attitude toward language is, as one might expect, determined by his singularly inflexible character. His governmental role is in a sense equal to his output of various documents (II, 164-165: 231-232). And his attitude toward communication is the opposite of the narrator's allusive, elliptical style in much of the novel. In the senator's view, "Every verbal exchange had to have a goal, plain and straight as a line. He relegated everything else to tea drinking and smoking what he called 'butts' " (I, 224: 122). His inclusion of all flowers under one name is a glaring instance of the inadequacy of his linguistic resources, and a damning example of his gravitation toward abstraction—a great evil, according to Bely in "The Magic of Words." The futility of his activities in the face of the great cosmic events looming over Russia and the rest of the world is painfully clear, and is underscored by the fact that on a spiritual level he is actually one of the unwitting reactionary minions of pan-Mongolism. As the narrator says of him, "People of that type always defend themselves with phrases like 'as is well known,' when nothing is known, or, science teaches us,' when science does not teach" (II, 194: 249). The same farcical inadequacy of cliché-defined worlds typifies Bely's satirical depiction of a political conservative and a professor of statistics at the Tsukatovs' ball (I, 195-196: 105-106). However, the most striking instance of an individual blinded by linguistic limitations is Likhutin. Because of them he literally goes insane when he is confronted by his wife's irresponsible behavior: The horrible lot of an ordinary, normal man whose life is determined by dictionaries of easily understandable words and acts. The acts draw him on, like a fragile vessel rigged out with words and gestures. If the fragile vessel runs aground on the submerged rock of inapprehensibility, it is wrecked, and the sailor drowns.

Petersburg

129

At life's slightest jolt, ordinary people are deprived of reason. (I, 241: 132) The narrator then describes the pain that Likhutin has been feeling in his head since his wife's "incomprehensible" behavior began, and comments that the "wall" confronting Likhutin was penetrable, although not for him. Dudkin, who is the most insightful of all the characters, and has a special relationship to Christ and an interest in the occult, also evinces an awareness of what a vital, as opposed to an ossified use of language entails. Specifically, he instructs Nikolai Ableukhov in the difference between an allegory and a symbol: Allegory is a symbol that has become common currency. For example, the usual understanding of your "beside yourself." A symbol is your act of appealing to what you experienced there, over the tin. A more appropriate term would be the term: pulsation of the elemental body. (II, 82:184) The "tin" in question is the bomb. It causes Nikolai to experience a bizarre state that Dudkin identifies by means of theosophical-anthroposophical terminology. An avoidance of all "common currency" typifies Bely's own practice in the novel as a whole. In fact, the work is unlike any other in Russian literature. One brief example will illustrate how Bely even manages to "make new" a common word—the adverb "suddenly" (vdrug), a special favorite of Dostoevsky's, whose works echo throughout Petersburg. Bely literally brings this overused word to life by personifying it (and by transforming it into a noun): he speaks of it "creeping" behind the reader and producing the sensation that a mob is ready to fall upon his back. Moreover, this "word" feeds on cerebral play. It gladly devours all vileness of thought . . . "Suddenly," like a fattened yet unseen dog, begins to precede you, producing in an observer the impression that you are screened from view by an invisible cloud. This is what your "suddenly" is. (I, 52: 24) The narrator's association of this familiar word with the concept of "cerebral play" makes the word into a manifestation of an aspect of the transcendent. By implication, the other words used by the narrator are similarly enlivened. Thus the problem of romantic irony in Petersburg is indeed resolved by Bely's revaluation of the act of writing, as was the problem of alter-

130

Andrei Bely

nating lyrical and third-person narration. All of the narrator-author's seeming revelations about his role in creating the text in fact show only that he is the tool of transcendent forces. -7One central passage in Petersburg voices Bely's conception of Russian national destiny and its relation to apocalyptic, world-historical events. Bely apparently considered the passage to be so important that he did not make a single change in it when he revised the rest of the novel. It serves well, therefore, as a point of departure for examining the nature of the transcendent forces, which, in their trajectory from the world of the spirit, end as cerebral play in man. The narrator's peroration 5 3 is inspired by Falconet's famous equestrian statue of Peter I, which stands in St. Petersburg's Senate Square. This monument already had a symbolic aura, of course, before Bely made it into one of the central symbols in the novel. Pushkin's long narrative poem The Bronze Horseman (1833) makes use of the statue as the genius loci of the city, and Bely builds on this tradition: 5 4 From that fecund time when the metallic Horseman had galloped hither. . . Russia was divided in two. Divided in two as well were the destinies of the fatherland. Suffering and weeping, Russia was divided in two, until the final hour. Russia, you are like a steed! Your front hooves have leaped far off into the darkness, into the void, while your two rear hooves are firmly planted in the granite soil. (I, 124: 64) Bely's triumphant conclusion is that Russia will heal her split destiny: "there will be a leap across history." It is not completely clear what this "leap" means; it may refer to a profound revolutionary upheaval during which Russia will abandon her past. (It is also possible that this image replicates one Bely used some years earlier to indicate Nietzsche's successful "leap" across the chasm of madness and death to immortality.) 55 In any event, it is certain that the result will be catastrophic. Geomorphological changes will sweep the land: "The earth shall be cleft. The very mountains shall be thrown down by the cataclysmic earthquake, and because of that earthquake our native plains will everywhere come forth humped. . . . As for Petersburg, it will sink." Next comes the all-important Asiatic invasion: In those days all the peoples of the earth will rush forth from their dwelling places. Great will be the strife, strife the like of which has never been seen in this world. The yellow hordes of Asians will set forth from their age-old abodes and will encrimson the

Petersburg

131

fields of Europe in oceans of blood. There will be, oh yes, there will—Tsushima! There will be—a new Kalka! Kulikovo Field, I await you! And on that day the final Sun will rise in radiance over my native land. Oh, Sun, if you do not rise, then, oh Sun, the shores of Europe will sink beneath the heavy Mongol heel, and foam will curl over those shores. Earthborn creatures once more will sink to the depths of the oceans, into chaos, primordial and long-forgotten. Arise, oh Sun! (1,125-126: 65) The vision is clearly of a Solovievian apocalypse, but with certain anthroposophic additions. The sinking and elevation of land masses recalls the emphasis Steiner placed on the destruction of Atlantis and comparable catastrophic events as markers of transitions between great epochs in man's history. 56 One of the names Christ has in anthroposophy is "Sun Being." Moreover, in the novel's manuscript Bely had originally continued the sentence "And on that day the final Sun will rise in radiance over my native land " with a phrase that was subsequently deleted: "that is our Lord, Christ." 57 And although the Antichrist is not referred to by name, his advent is clearly implied by the Asiatic invasion which, according to Soloviev, was the first of the series of major events that would culminate in Armageddon and the Second Coming. The actual historical events of September and October 1905—Russia's defeat by Japan in the East, and revolution at home, both of which comprise the novel's background—could only confirm Bely's belief that Soloviev's prophecy was literally coming true. Bely's letters to Blok at the time he was beginning to work on Petersburg support this impression. 58 Thus his fixation on pan-Mongolism in the novel can be understood as an additional reflection of his view that fiction and reality are continuous. In this context, it makes perfect sense that he would have chosen Asia as one of the major symbols for the transcendent in Petersburg,59 However, despite the imminent destruction of Russia and the West at the hands of Asia, the various manifestations of things Asian do not horrify or revolt the narrator. In fact, in the passage about the invasion quoted above, the narrator welcomes the final struggle of good and evil by invoking the fourteenth-century Russian victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo Field. This attitude reveals a major characteristic of Petersburg that has not been sufficiently appreciated in the criticism—namely, that Bely has transvalued evil into something closer to good. The reason for this is of course the final outcome: all intermediate suffering on earth is like Milton's "fortunate fall"—it will be redeemed and given its true meaning by the Second Coming.

132

Andrei Bely

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's—a 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 οηο,/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 fatalism—evident in all of his earlier belletristic works—would 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.

Petersburg

133

The visions of the major characters occur during unusual states of consciousness, giving the reader glimpses of the forces at work beyond the visible, physical world. The recipients of the visions themselves rarely carry the memory of what they saw into their normal or waking lives. Here, as with the narrator's discussions of cognition, the reader again shares the narrator's perspective on the nature of the transcendent. Together, they rise above the characters' experiences and view them with a measure of detachment born of deeper understanding. The senator's vision takes place as he drifts off to sleep. The entire scene is Bely's highly imaginative dramatization of an experience common to both theosophy and anthroposophy, namely, the "astral voyage." According to Steiner, one aspect of man's spiritual dimension (the "astral body") leaves the physical body during sleep and journeys into a spiritual realm from which it draws sustenance. 61 To provide access to the transcendent, Bely has a "corridor" form at the crown of the senator's head and extend into an "abyss," called the senator's "second space" (1,174: 93). Apollon Apollonovich has the impression that "something" (nechto) sitting in his brain can both look into this other dimension and travel into it. It is tempting to infer that this conduit is somehow related to the intrusive forces that produced the creative cerebral play in the senator's mind. During the first phase of his journey, the senator appears to be moving through a series of rooms, accompanied by his bulldog; earlier, the senator's cerebral play was shown to have created the house in which he lives with his son. Thus, the first phase of Apollon Apollonovich's "voyage" is colored by the construct of the forces intruding into his mind in the beginning of the novel. More important, however, is that in a "hall" he encounters a Mongol he had once seen in Tokyo, but who is also his son Nikolai. Consequently, the senator's spiritual self is shown to be in contact with a harbinger of the apocalypse. It follows, of course, that if the son is an Asiatic, then this racial trait must be shared by his father—which is exactly what is revealed in Nikolai's vision. The coercive effect of the transcendent shows up in the senator's exchange with the Mongol. In response to the senator's indignant demand for some explanation, the Mongol responds with two apparently contradictory statements: "According to an emergency [literally: extraordinary] regulation!" and "There are neither paragraphs nor regulations!" (1,176: 94-95). These remarks are too brief to warrant extensive analysis. However, they can be reconciled as two faces of apocalyptic destruction. The absence of codes or regulations might be related to the revolution threatening to sweep away established norms. The "extraordinary regulation," by contrast, evokes the reactionary policies of the

134

Andrei Bely

government, and thus seems to be linked to the theme of rigidity that is an echo of the spiritual mortification associated with the Antichrist. The senator and his world are caught between these two forces, which in a larger context are different sides of the same apocalyptic coin. Reaction and revolution—as they exist for mortals on the terrestrial plane—appear essentially identical from the point of view of the transcendent. Implicit in such a conception is that Bely is of course devaluing collective human activity in the face of a grand cosmic design. Within the context of the novel as a whole, rigidity is deliberately assigned to Apollon Apollonovich, who is its most obvious representative. Significantly, ice had a formative influence on his character. Once during his youth, the narrator explains, the senator almost froze to death in the countryside; he felt someone's cold fingers thrust into his chest and stroke his heart. Then this icy hand began to lead Apollon Apollonovich up the steps of his career (1,104-105: 52-53). There is no explanation for this strange event, but the hand's intrusion clearly resembles the intrusion of transcendent forces into human consciousness. With this in mind, Dolgopolov's identification of a parallel between Apollon Apollonovich's experience and an event in Soloviev's "Tale" is especially fruitful. At the crucial moment when he accepts Satan's patronage, the individual who becomes the Antichrist feels that a "sharp icy stream" enters him. 62 But in keeping with the transvaluation of good and evil in Petersburg, the senator is more an amusingly grotesque reactionary and pathetic old man in the grip of forces that he cannot understand, than the self-conscious incarnation of Satanic evil. The senator's association with ice, and his idiosyncratic rigidity in private life as well as in his political views, might be supposed to make him something like the Western pole in the novel—the opposite of the pan-Mongolian East. However, the conception of the novel as a portrayal of a dialectical struggle between the rational West and the irrational East is not supported by the text. As Bely commented in his memoirs, Soloviev's pan-Mongolism, a symbol for "darkness" and the "internal swamping of consciousness," can be found in both West and East. In the West it is characterized by an impulse born of "dark reaction, numeration and mechanization" that substitutes for the new revolutionary, spiritual, and creative impulse in mankind. 6 3 Consequently, the same blurring of distinctions that typifies Bely s views of good and evil is also likely to affect the traditional conceptions of East and West in the novel, despite the image of Russia at a crossroads in the narrator's paean to Peter's statue. As I suggested in the preceding chapter, Bely had already abandoned the problematic necessity of choosing between East and West in The Silver Dove, despite his apparent original intention to pose such a choice. Thus even geography in Petersburg emerges as laden with eschatological significance.

Petersburg

135

After encountering the Mongol, Apollon Apollonovich's astral body enters another dimension in the spiritual realm and has an experience that subtly links the entire Ableukhov family drama to anthroposophic teaching, and, ultimately, the apocalypse as well. The senator feels as if he has flown out through the breach in his head into "pretemporal gloom." There, he senses a form of some kind (reminiscent of the bottom of a bathtub), filled with stinking abomination. The sensations began splashing about in the bathtub with the dungy water. The sensations now stuck to the vessel. Consciousness struggled to break away, but sensations were pulling a heavy something. (1,177: 95) Immediately after this passage, the narrator states that consciousness saw itself inhabiting a little yellow old man, which links the foulness convincingly with Apollon Apollonovich. The significance of this bizarre association becomes apparent only later in the novel, after the return of the senator's adulterous wife to St. Petersburg. The narrator explains that the Ableukhov "domestic hearth" had become "a sewer of abomination." And now that Anna Petrovna is back, the senator realizes that he must return to this "abomination" (II, 191: 247). The foulness had its origin in the sexual relationship between the senator and his wife. Describing their wedding night, the narrator states that Apollon Apollonovich committed an act of legally sanctioned rape. The rape had continued for years, and Nikolai was engendered during this period. As a result, Nikolai himself had become "a composite of disgust, fright, and lechery." These associations suggest that the Ableukhov family drama has its roots in the spiritual realm. Lust, the dominant disruptive force in the family—which is passed from the senator to his wife and son—is shown by means of the image of foulness that the senator encounters during his astral voyage to be related to something like an incarnation in the spiritual realm: the senator's consciousness senses a malodorous fluid substance, and gradually becomes attached to it; this fluid turns out to be the senator's corporeal self. Because the senator's vision has several parallels to anthroposophic teaching, his experiences should not be read in the reverse order of his reliving in a dream familial problems over which he agonized during waking hours. In anthroposophy, influence moves primarily in one direction—from the spirit world to man. According to Steiner, the powerful human passions including sexuality became a part of man's nature during the so-called "Moon cycle" of cosmic evolution, when the "astral body" itself became a component of man. During this phase of man's and the earth's evolution, man first developed the ability to sense the world outside himself. He also developed upper and lower parts to his

136

Andrei Bely

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 teaching—and one that is directly relevant to the senator's situation in Petersburg—is that "the higher, more noble divine forces have an affinity with the—apparently—lower 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 phases—the Mongol, and the bathtub—is 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.

Petersburg

137

Nikolai undergoes a spiritual adventure much like his father's, and is also shown to be in thrall to the apocalypse. It is interesting that in the first and second editions of the novel, the narrator overtly identifies "a distant astral voyage" and "dreaming" as "the same thing" (1916: p. 265: 165). In the 1928 edition the reference to "astral voyage" was dropped; instead, the narrator speaks of a "distant wandering" being the same as dreaming (II, 49). Nikolai's vision also begins with a corridor that opens onto "measureless immensity" (II, 49: 165). Similarly, the Mongolian theme is evoked soon thereafter by the appearance before Nikolai of a "hallowed Turanian." But before this figure has a chance to open its mouth, as it were, and give Nikolai instruction in the task he must fulfill, Nikolai himself "fantasizes" 68 that he too is an old Turanian who has become incarnated in the hereditary Russian nobility. He believes his task is to shake everything to its very foundation. The Ancient Dragon was to feed on tainted blood, and to consume everything in flame. The ancient Orient had rained a hail of bombs on our age. And Nikolai Apollonovich was an old Turanian bomb. (II, 50: 166) However, the ancient Turanian disagrees with Nikolai and proclaims: "Not the destruction of Europe but its immutability." The Turanian's correction establishes that the Mongolian task is to promote inflexibility in all aspects of life. This statement recalls one of the remarks the senator heard in his own vision, and, as a result, "legitimizes" his own rigidity as well as Nikolai's labors in constructing a vast, rigorous, and apparently Kantian philosophical system, which the narrator mentions at different points in the novel. The efforts of both father and son thus turn out to be manifestations of the earliest phase of a Solovievian eschatology. It goes without saying that Kant's views on metaphysics were antithetical to Bely's conception of symbolism, as well as to anthroposophy. 69 In fact, anthroposophy still claims to have overcome the limitations that Kant imposed on knowledge. Moreover, outside the context of the apocalypse as a whole, there is nothing appealing about pan-Mongolism as such. So the ancient Turanian's implicit rejection of Nikolai's patricide, and presumably, of all revolutionary destruction, is not the final word on the matter. Within the context of the novel as a whole, the bomb is clearly a préfiguration of the imminent apocalypse, and as such cannot be denied. But as a harbinger of temporarily triumphant evil, pan-Mongolism would have to be opposed to revolutionary change because time will inevitably bring the downfall of the Antichrist. Perhaps this is the limited point of view from which Nikolai's Turanian mentor speaks. It is not clear how the statement the Mongol

138

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 view—the 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, he—are 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-

Petersburg

139

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

140

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 Ivanych—Evgeny—now 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

Petersburg

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

142

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-

Petersburg

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

144

Andrei Bely

The appearance and behavior of the white domino clearly resemble that of the Etheric Christ. Given Bely's syncretism, it is easy to imagine how he could have reconciled the Christian idea of a Second Coming with the gradually increasing manifestation of the Etheric Christ and the changes in the world that would be brought about as a result. - 8 -

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-

Petersburg

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 evolution—tendencies 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 qualities—including 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.

146

Andrei Bely

As for Ahriman, Bely seems to have given Lippanchenko a number of the traits associated with Steiner s spirit of matter. Reason, physical ugliness, greed, egotism, fixedness, ossification, measure and calculation are all associated with Ahriman and applicable to Lippanchenko to varying degrees. The Ahrimanic influence, which causes absorption in the physical and sensory world at the expense of the spiritual, prevents Lippanchenko from understanding Dudkin's mystical credo that the revolution is a hypostasis. A number of times Bely hints at occult experiences Dudkin had in Helsingfors in which both Shishnarfne and Lippanchenko were involved. (This is more explicit in the first edition of the novel.) The evil consequence of these experiences was an augmentation of the physically sensual, or Ahrimanic side of Dudkin's nature: "he became a drunkard, his lustfulness began to act up" (1916: p. 340). Fearfulness is also associated with Ahriman, and Dudkin is repeatedly and easily frightened by Lippanchenko, who, in fact, uses fear as a tool to keep Dudkin under control. 74 An Ahrimanic combination of gross physicality (even Lippanchenko's paramour's surname is Fleisch) and powerful cerebration shapes the image of how Lippanchenko forces his will on Dudkin: his "frontal bones [literally, "the bones of his forehead"] strained in a strong and obstinate effort to break down his [Dudkin's] will, o r . . . fly to pieces. And the frontal bones broke it down" (II, 102:195). Lippanchenko's physically repulsive head is also associated in Dudkin's mind with the Mongol face that appears on the wallpaper of his room at night (II, 94:191), thus linking the agent-provocateur with the specifically Solovievian world-historical process. But whether he fits Steiner's scheme or Soloviev's, Lippanchenko, who wants to manipulate the world, finally emerges as an agent of forces that derive from and disappear into an otherworldly realm. In Steiner's terms, Lippanchenko is acting in accordance with forces that try to thwart a balanced cosmic evolution. But his efforts fail. Rather than causing a major catastrophe, the bomb goes off without hurting anyone. In truth, Apollon Apollonovich's governmental career was already effectively over before the explosion, because he suffered a sudden onset of senility. In turn, this may have been brought about by his son's shocking behavior as the red domino (which is actually the senator's own perverted sexuality returning to him in the form of his sexually troubled son). Or it may have been simply the work of time, as the narrator suggests (II, 172: 236). Like Kudeiarov and his implied demonic masters, Lippanchenko and his Ahrimanic-Mongolian masters fail to thwart a divinely ordained plan. From their vantage points at the beginning of this century, both Steiner and Soloviev were funda-

Petersburg

147

mentally optimistic about the outcome of cosmic history, and in the end their separate eschatologies dramatize the final impotence of evil. The false, or better to say, non-apocalypse near the end of Petersburg defines the strangely muted ending of the novel. The tension of Lippanchenko's machinations has been dissipated without much effect other than Nikolai's banishment; and the true apocalyptic storm, signs of which are abundant, is yet to come. This ending is like those of the Second Symphony and The Silver Dove, in which proto-apocalyptic schemes collapse while true eschatological anticipation fills both the narrator and the characters with whom he is in agreement. Lippanchenko's death by Dudkin's hand may thus be seen as an explicit condemnation of the agent-provocateur's role by the author and the positive forces at whose urgings he speaks. For a brief moment before the murder, in a passage to which I already referred, Dudkin experiences something like a clairvoyant insight into the terrorist drama of which he has been made a part: Alexander Ivanych—Evgeny—now understood for the first time that he had been running in vain for a century, from December to October, and in his wake came a rumbling without the slightest wrath—through villages, towns, entryways, stairways. He was forgiven. Everything that had happened along with everything that was coming was merely spectral transiences of ordeals to be endured until the last trumpet sounded [italics mine]. (II, 132133: 214) This passage calls forth a wide range of events that are all made into adumbrations of the true apocalypse—the fate of Pushkin's protagonist in The Bronze Horseman, the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, and, by implication, everything that had happened up to this point in the novel. It is significant that Dudkin's insight occurs during the moments immediately following his "decision" to kill Lippanchenko, and immediately preceding the Bronze Horseman's intrusive flow into his veins. Both this experience and the murder thus seem to be sanctioned by an agent of the otherworldly realm. To be sure, textual evidence for this point is tenuous, but it seems likely that because of his own association with Christ, and because of the Horseman's association with the true apocalyptic future of Russia, Dudkin may be an executioner driven by the positive forces in their struggle against Ahrimanic evil. And this defeat of one evil individual is, in part, a small-scale version of the apocalyptic defeat of Evil by Good that will come with the Second Coming. The passage just quoted is also an expression of a spiraling view of time. It implies that there will have been numerous repetitions of situations that foreshadow the true apocalypse (including a personal tragedy

148

Andrei Bely

of a fictional character!) before the end of world history is reached. The theme of repetition was explicit, of course, in the astral voyages of the senator and his son, which reveal that the contemporary situation in Russia, with the various manifestations of Asia, is a reenactment of a conflict from centuries before. And having Dudkin enact the repetitive fates of individuals from different epochs suggests that, to Bely's mind, a spiraling view of existence in time still defines man's relation to the transcendent, as it did in the Third Symphony and The Silver Dove. -9-

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 face—the 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

Petersburg

149

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 préfigurations 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 unreal—already traditional in nineteenth-century Russian literature—is credible if the entire world of material phenomena is seen as a translucent, and at times permeable screen projected by a spiritual re-

150

Andrei Bely

ality. Creation through deception recalls the narrator's digression at the end of Chapter I about the nature of creative cognition; the city is a "delusion" only from a privileged, spiritual point of view. The Flying Dutchman is further linked to Peter I, of course, because the conjuring of islands out of clouds echoes Peter's creation of his new capital on barren Finnish swamps. Finally, the whole sequence from text to intrusive passage and back to text constitutes one of the rapid shifts between merely human and more privileged viewpoints that recur throughout the novel. The naval motif also appears in a more prosaic, but no less significant form as a "small steamboat" on the Neva and the canals (I, 61, 242, 250; II, 125, 251: 29, 133, 137, 209, 282). It shows up without any apparent relation to context, as a perception of the narrator that is not linked to particular characters or situations. In consequence, what seems to be background description serves as a reminder of the intrusive nature of the transcendent. The associations raised by "steamboat," "mariner," "Flying Dutchman," "Bronze Horseman," have the effect of "digesting" the novel's multifarious constituents to reveal a series of veiled references to one thing—the coming apocalypse. But despite fluid boundaries between symbols, individual symbols do not simply become synonyms for each other, even if the ultimate significance of each is apocalyptic. The Flying Dutchman, for instance, continues to have a Wagnerian meaning as well as the one Bely gave him. Like the characters in the novel, the Flying Dutchman is doomed to act out a fate set by a supernatural power. Moreover, the operatic theme of woman's faithfulness also appears in Petersburg in the senator's wayward wife and Sofia Petrovna. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to summarize the full range of implications of any one of the symbols, which is, of course, another way of saying that the recurring images in question are symbols. It is interesting that the fluid transitions among symbols in the novel appear to be reflected in its punctuation. This is an important feature of Bely s art that has yet to be studied in the detail it deserves. Unusually large numbers of colons, semicolons, and dashes appear in the text. They signal differing lengths of pauses in the narrative, thus building up varying degrees of tension, and, at the same time, anticipate connections with the following syntactical units. Where periods would have signaled full stops, and commas a simple pause, Bely utilizes a range of punctuation marks that lie somewhere in between. The effect this has is to segment the text into syntactical units that are not as strongly separated as they would be if commas and periods were the dominant punctuation marks, at the same time causing a nervous flow and pause in reading. The method serves to augment the impression that the world in the novel is multifariously interconnected. 76

Petersburg

151

The last example of a symbol cluster that is worth tracing because of its extraordinarily wide associations is the expanding crimson sphere. It is the image of an explosion, and as such clearly presages the apocalypse. It first appears in the course of Apollon Apollonovich's encounter with Dudkin on a city street. The senator likens the people he sees through the windows of his carriage to shining dots. One of these seems to fly at him "taking the form of an immense crimson sphere." This is Dudkin materializing through him, of course, and the proto-explosive image is repeated in Dudkin's eyes: "the eyes . . . recognized the senator, and, having recognized him, they grew rabid, dilated, lit up, and flashed" (I, 36: 14). The image of explosion illustrates the anthroposophical belief that internal spiritual communication with the transcendent is manifested in the world outside the communicant. For, as if anticipating Dudkin's circular "return" into the senator's head later in the chapter, the senator also senses an explosion within himself: "in his breast arose the sensation of a crimson sphere about to burst into pieces . . . Apollon Apollonovich, you see, suffered from dilation of the heart." Nikolai has a similar experience when he is returning from the masked ball. He feels that in the place "where his heart was located" a crimson sphere appears, which expands and then bursts (I, 233: 128). As it happened with Dudkin, the senator sees the explosion in his son's eyes as well, and associates his son with the revolutionary (II, 2 4 : 1 5 0 ) . The crimson explosion is also echoed in a passage about the little steamboat, calling forth the entire naval motif together with Peter's fateful role in Russian history: "A flaming lantern on the stern [of a small steamboat] vanished at an angle into the fog, and the rings spread, ruby red" (II, 251: 282). The expanding sphere is evoked even at the end of the novel. The whole muted Epilogue resembles the Pralaya of anthroposophy, a concept Steiner borrowed from Hindu myth, and which signifies a period of rest between great phases of cosmic evolution. 7 7 The Epilogue is like the lull before the apocalypse proper, therefore, now that Lippanchenko's false apocalypse has dissipated. But although the bomb exploded some time before, a remnant seems to have followed Nikolai to Egypt as a foreshadowing of the true apocalyptic explosion to come: "Evening has begun to fall. The large piles of Gizeh stretch menacingly into the dawnless twilight. Yes, yes: everything is expanded in them, everything expands from them [italics mine]; and dark amber lights now go on in the dust suspended in the air. And it is stifling" (II, 268: 292). It is as if the dust and the heat of the explosion are still in the air, even though Nikolai is far away from the source of power and the original site of the blast—the northern city straddling the worlds of matter and spirit.

152

Andrei Bely

The expanding sphere is also linked to anthroposophy directly, but in a way that again shows Bely bending its teaching to fit his apocalypticism. Steiner explains that the various physical organs of man developed during different phases of the earth's evolution, as did the different components of man's spiritual nature. For this reason, anthroposophy literally considers man to be "fashioned from the entire surrounding world, and every part of him corresponds to a process or being of the outer world." At the appropriate stage in his development, a student of anthroposophy can begin "to feel as though he were intergrown with the entire cosmic structure." 78 This is the sensation that some characters experience in the novel, but with the addition of the explosion motif, and with the usual difference that none of the characters is on a spiritual quest. At one point, the narrator says about Nikolai's soul: "[it] was becoming the surface of a huge, rapidly growing bubble, which had swollen into Saturn's orbit . . . Everything—was bursting" (II, 254-55: 284). Lippanchenko has a similar experience when Dudkin has mortally wounded him (II, 218-19: 263-64). A detail in the narrator's description of Lippanchenko's death provides the connection between the explosion motif and the rather cryptic Ableukhov coat of arms. The narrator mentions that after Dudkin stabs the agent-provocateur in the stomach with a pair of scissors "from there came a hissing. And some part of him thought [literally: And it thought itself somewhere] that it was gases . . . a volcano opened up in his stomach." The stabbing recalls the coat of arms, which depicts a knight being gored by a unicorn—an image that functions as a knot tying together a variety of strands in the novel. First of all, it shows a man under attack by a mythical or supernatural creature. Secondly, its special relevance to the Ableukhovs is implied in Apollon Apollonovich's dream vision, in which he appears as a knight dressed in armor (I, 175: 94). Thirdly, the unicorn was a symbol for Christ in medieval Europe, and Nikolai Apollonovich at one point feels "pierced" by the light streaming from the eyes of the "white domino." Similarly, when Dudkin commits the murder, he is acting under the influence of the bronze statue that has recently "poured" into his veins. The unicorn, in turn, simply by virtue of several equine features also recalls the mounted horseman. All these varied associations turn the coat of arms into a microcosm of Bely's deterministic world view in Petersburg.79

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

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.

154

Andrei Bely

Support for this inference can be found in Notes of an Eccentric, a frankly memoiristic work published in Berlin in 1922—a less repressive place and time. In it Bely implies that he came to know the prenatal experiences he described in Kotik Letaev by means of anthroposophical meditations. Later, in a letter from 1927 that was obviously not intended for publication, Bely speaks of the "anthroposophical academic task" that is embodied in Kotik Letaev: "through an expansion of memory to truly see something of what had not been seen" in infancy. And in Why I Became a Symbolist, the important memoir he wrote for his "desk drawer" in 1928, Bely says he described his spiritual development "most exactly" in Kotik Letaev.3 Bely actually wrote the novel while helping to build the Goetheanum—the combined theater and temple that Steiner designed and anthroposophical initiates constructed by hand in Dörnach, Switzerland. His immersion in the "occult science" at this time in his life (19141916) was total. Given the central importance in anthroposophy of the "Akashic record"—a cosmic transcript of all human experience that can be "read" with great accuracy by the clairvoyant—there is no reason to doubt that Bely meant all his depictions of his seemingly fanciful spiritual experiences to be taken as literally true. In fact, the inviolate authority that the Akashic record has for the anthroposophist lends a weight to the accuracy of the clairvoyant's recovered past experiences that simple memory lacks. Thus the sole truly fictional aspect of Kotik Letaev is that most of the names of the characters have been changed (Bely himself appears as "Kotik Letaev": the first name is a diminutive of endearment that his mother actually used, whereas the last is derived from the verb "to fly" and rhymes with his actual surname, Bugaev). There is also the very minor detail of a single mention of "sisters" (that could be meant figuratively), while Bely was in reality an only child. 4 The work hardly qualifies as fiction, therefore, even in the special sense that applied to Petersburg. Inevitably, given the subject matter, Kotik Letaev's focus is the formation and development of the eponymous protagonist's personality. External events are relatively few as a result, and Kotik's story consists largely of his gradual withdrawal from and loss of unmediated contact with the spiritual realm out of which he descended when he was born. This process clearly derives from Steiners view that "the human soul and entire being are, during the first years of earthly life, in much closer connection with the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies than they are later." 5 Concurrent with the process of withdrawal is the gradual crystallization of the sense of self as differentiating from the external world of matter.

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

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

156

Andrei Bely

comparison to Petersburg. However, the change is not wholly to the generally calm and roseate atmosphere of Steiner's writings (his "mystery dramas" are another matter). Kotik, like his predecessors in Bely's other works, is very much under a coercive sway of a spiritual realm. In part, this follows inevitably from Steiner's belief that the human soul sojourns in an otherworldly realm before birth. But Kotik also anticipates having to suffer a Christ-like passion in the future, which may be due as much to the simple fact that Bely did not have a happy childhood as to the important role that Christ has for the intitiate in anthroposophy. It was typical for Bely to give cosmic significance to his own and his characters' troubled spiritual states. The most striking innovation in Kotik Letaev is the double first-person perspective that operates throughout the novel (which, however, is an inevitable feature of childhood autobiographies). The narrator makes it clear in the Foreword that he is thirty-five years old at the time he is telling his story. He has achieved a state of clairvoyant "self-consciousness," which "has burst open my brain and thrown itself into childhood." The result is that he and his infant self can now "converse" and "understand" each other (9: 3). This image of the adult confronting himself as a child comes directly from Steiner's explanation of how the achievement of occult insight appears to the adept: In the higher world, self-knowledge is different, in a certain respect, from self-knowledge in the physical-sensory world. Whereas in the physical-sensory world self-knowledge appears only as an inner experience, the new-born self presents itself at once as an outer soul phenomenon. Man beholds his new-born self as another being standing before him, but he cannot perceive it completely . . . . there are always still higher stages. 9 This is the pivotal event in the narrator-author's life because it makes the work he is writing possible. The adult narrator also draws a parallel between the special form of cognition that his self-consciousness denotes and the beginning awareness of a child: "Self-consciousness, like an infant within me, opened its eyes wide" (13: 6). Thus Bely is implying that his procedure in the rest of the work will be to present his own development from the point of view of anthroposophy, which retroactively illuminates for him the physical and spiritual sides of his infancy. Implied also is that the child's spiritual development—which reflects cosmic evolution—will be given from the anthroposophical perspective of the adept who has achieved illumination by ascending through the requisite stages. (This represents an interesting variant on Ernst Heinrich Haeckel's seminal idea that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—that the development of an individual reflects the evolution of

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

157

the species. Haeckel's notion reappears in various forms in the novel, and is a fundamental characteristic of Steiner's world view and conception of man in general. Indeed, Steiner is known to have admired Haeckel's ideas.) The effect of Bely's tactic, therefore, is that the same entity—namely "Kotik Letaev" himself—is examined from two obviously interrelated, but still widely divergent points of view: that of the infant's confused and uncomprehending perception of the world in which he exists (presumably preserved in the adult Kotik's normal memory), and that of the infant's spiritual experiences as retrieved, ordered, and illuminated retroactively by the adult's occult "clear vision." This was, presumably, the meaning of Bely's remark about the "anthroposophical academic task" that he had set himself in writing the work. The fact that the second point of view is occult rather than simply adult is Bely's most striking innovation in the genre of childhood autobiography. But although the first-person narrative premise of this genre eliminates in advance the problem of the Symbolist narrative that Bely resolved in Petersburg, a different type of textual segmentation does appear in Kotik Letaev (to which I will return below). One must assume that some overlap between these two view points is inevitable because the adult's clairvoyance should also be able to resurrect the totality of the child's experiences, including the confusion. Moreover, it seems unavoidable that some of the adult's clairvoyant perspectives should "contaminate" the child's original experiences. The narrative shifts often and easily between the two poles. Rapid shifts in point of view and narrative voice also characterized Bely's earlier works and contributed much to their nervous narrative texture and elliptical suggestiveness. But Kotik Letaev's perspectives both derive from and are directed at the same multidimensional persona, which exists on both spiritual and material planes, rather than at some phenomenon external to it. The end result of this practice, however, is comparable to that in the earlier works. In Petersburg, for instance, the shifts from the senator's rigid and unimaginative cogitations to an indented passage about the Flying Dutchman conjuring land out of fog, then back to the senator, sketch several different but interrelated planes of reality that define the complex material and spiritual world posited by the novel. In Kotik Letaev, the shifts in point of view sketch the different planes of being— both eternal and time-bound—on which Kotik himself exists. As a result, he emerges as a composite of physical and spiritual dimensions— indeed, as the entity that bridges them. Like the city in Petersburg, Kotik is both embedded in, and a symbol for the entire cosmos. Not only does the Foreword define the parameters of the work—in contrast to Petersburg, where the Prologue serves as foil for the remainder of the text—it also adumbrates the major themes that will

158

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-

In the Foreword, the narrator depicts a rugged mountain landscape very much like the Swiss Alps Bely enjoyed climbing while in Dörnach. 1 0 And the Foreword ends with a mention of the Swiss locales and the year in which Bely (as opposed to Kotik Letaev) wrote it, reinforcing the autobiographism of the text as a whole. More important, however, is that the narrator clearly wants the dramatic scenery to represent his turbulent past and prefigure his future. He presents himself at a summit in his life, which must be the consequence of the "self-consciousness" that he has achieved. But the jagged mountain scenery is not merely a metaphor, emblem, or objective correlative for the narrator's spiritual development. It also appears to be the actual physical deposit of the narrators spiritual growth: In memory I speak with myself:—here, on the steeply slicing line: — —"At your feet is everything that once grew out of you painfully and that was you; —"that kept falling away like dead stone and kept being repeated by cliffs . . . —"Nature, which surrounds you, is—you; among her gloomy gorges you are visible to me, infant. . . (12: 5 - 6 ) As in Petersburg, the indented passages and original typographical arrangements in Kotik Letaev are often a record of a sudden shift in perspective, calling attention to the content of the set-off passage. In this instance, the narrator has described the same sort of reification of thought into matter that Bely dramatized in the first chapter of Petersburg. There, both Dudkin and the senator's house were called products of the senator's cerebral play, which, in turn, was a mask for occult forces that intruded into the narrator-author's mind as well as into the minds of the characters. Extrinsic support for claiming that the cognitive creative process established in Petersburg also operates in Kotik Letaev is provided by Be-

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized

Chinaman

159

ly's revealing essay "On the Meaning of Cognition" (1916).11 Because it is written entirely from an anthroposophical perspective, its argument is difficult to follow in places. But it is clearly a disquisition about the same process of spiritual development that is dramatized on the pages of Kotik Letaev. The essay's relevance for the novel is further indicated by its year of composition, and, even more so, by its numerous specific formulations of key concepts that are nearly identical to those found in the novel. Bely himself underscored the significance of the essay long after he wrote it by referring to it as part of his continuing attempt to produce a complete theory of symbolism. As he said in his memoir Between Two Revolutions, "On the Meaning of Cognition" contains "traces" of the "skeleton" of the entire theory, which, although remaining unfinished, was clear in his mind. 12 This avowal provides additional evidence for the general continuity of Bely s thought before and after he fell under Steiners influence. Moreover, it inadvertently reveals Bely's continuing loyalty to anthroposophy at a time when he took pains to hide this from public view in the Soviet Union. The essay's particular utility is that it suggests a framework for understanding Kotik Letaev, and shows the novel to be based in a much more orthodox conception of anthroposophy than was Petersburg,13 In the light of the essay, the narrator's task in Kotik Letaev is confirmed as the depiction of the achievement of "self-consciousness"—a direct knowledge of the higher worlds, which is the ultimate goal of anthroposophy. In Petersburg, by contrast, clairvoyant experiences were vouchsafed to individuals who did not undergo the meditative training that Steiner thought was necessary for the achievement of "spiritual sight" and who failed to understand what they saw. The idea of thought descending from the realm of spirit and passing through man to create matter recurs in the essay a number of times. Bely affirms that "the world thoughts [mirovye my sii] are deposited [slagaiutsia] in us by the world of thought, and through us incarnate the universe. We create a world in the world." In characterizing the nature of this created world, Bely echoes the Alpine imagery from the Foreword of Kotik Letaev: "the world of concepts, objects, forms and images crystallizes [italics mine] within cognitive acts." Similarly, he likens cognition to an organic process whose "waste products" are like "mineral parts" (p. 39). Numerous parallels exist between Kotik's experiences with the worlds of matter and spirit and those of the narrator and characters in Petersburg. Moreover, because the novel is primarily concerned with the process of the individual's spiritual development, it is possible to discern several stages in Kotik's relation to the material world on the one hand, and to the spiritual cosmos on the other.

160

Andrei Bely

Early on, the narrator establishes the primacy of the otherworldly realm in the formulation of thought and the creation of the material world (as was also the case in Petersburg): "The world and thought are only the foams of threatening cosmic images; blood pulses with their flight; thoughts are illumined by their fires; and these images are— myths" (19: 11). In "On the Meaning of Cognition," Bely uses the same expression when he speaks of matter and concepts as the "foams" that "cool" out of the boiling of undifferentiated reality during the initial stage of cognition (p. 44). As in Petersburg, the thoughts that derive from an otherworldly realm bear an intrusive and ultimately deterministic relation to the individual. In the early stage of his existence Kotik appears as a mere physical receptacle for thoughts: "an arising child's thought recalls a comet; now it falls into the body; and—its tail bloodies." This is reminiscent of images for the transcendent's relation to the earth in the first two Symphonies, and in the early theoretical essay discussed in Chapter 1 above. Significantly, the descent of thought into the body occurs immediately after Kotik's physical birth; in the preceding paragraph the narrator had described the moment when Kotik's head is already in the world, while his feet are still in the womb (20: 11-12). The idea of a cosmic reality entering Kotik's corporeal self with great violence is repeated again a few pages later. An "old woman," who, the narrator speculates, is some sort of primeval "extra-corporeal condition" of his that "does not want to accept Τ "—the higher, divine self that enters man's spirit, according to anthroposophy—"describing an arc in space, collapsed directly into my back" (24-25: 15). The old woman recalls the female image for eternity from the Symphonies. Bely s proffering a second image of intrusion after "the comet" of a few pages earlier is a good illustration of the spiraling narrative form of Kotik Letaev, which is, in turn, a reflection of the protagonist's spiraling evolution. There is a definite progression in his gradual loss of unmediated contact with the spiritual realm, which is a function of his age. At the same time, while still a child, he returns to earlier moments in his life—not simply remembering, but reexperiencing them over and over again—apparently because the inherent instability of experience requires it to be relived before it is established permanently. After the image of the "old woman," the narrator turns to a highly revealing description of the first, tentative, and ultimately ephemeral formation of Kotik's sense of self. An integral part of this process is the reification of intruding cosmic thoughts into the matter that defines Kotik's world. After experiencing the sensation of being a point that swells to a sphere, then bursts and reforms a number of times, the narrator describes in an indented paragraph how "darkness (like a snake-

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

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 are—parts of my body; they have been cast off by me; and—they 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: I—am 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 is—the 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 them—I 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

162

Andrei Bely

thoughts that occur spontaneously in characters. 15 The rhythmicized passages in Kotik Letaev inevitably reinforce for the reader the effect of the narrator's words about the occult meaning of rhythm. But for reasons to be discussed below, the rhythm in the novel should be taken at most as an inducement for the reader to search his own existence for comparable experiences, rather than as a bridge thrown across the gap between reality and fiction, which was the way cerebral play was meant to function in Petersburg. In Petersburg the scene of Dudkin's confrontation with Shishnarfne was modeled on the anthroposophical conception of "thought beings" and "sound beings" into whose realm the adept could penetrate, and who, in turn, could enter the world of man through the adept. The same schema operates in Kotik Letaev, albeit without the atmosphere of hallucinatory terror that colors many of the occult experiences in Petersburg. For example, sound is a means of contact between the individual and the transcendent, as in passages where Kotik is playing with his doll, Ruprecht, which is like the life of sound in me; but the life of sound in me is—not mine: it belongs to the world of sound which is lowering itself into me: to play on me as if . . . on a piano key; having experienced that sound, I experienced it not in myself, but in a being of the land of sound into which I was raised. (204:153) This complex image comes straight from Steiner s teaching about "sound beings." The narrator then goes on to say that he was not given a clear view of the "land of sound," but did manage to glimpse a "sound apartment with all the domestic equipment of rooms of sound." There is no indication here that this otherworldly version of the apartment is the source of the rooms Kotik deposited in a material version outside himself. Nevertheless, the "sound apartment" is to the Letaev apartment as a Platonic Idea is to its material embodiment. In the terms of the theory of symbolism that Bely developed before encountering anthroposophy, Kotik's experiences with the skull temple and sound beings are instances of creative cognition (with the clear understanding that Kotik is not the source of creative forces, but only the channel for them), or symbolic perceptions: the Letaev apartment and all else that Kotik sees come to symbolize an entire otherworldly realm and man's relation to it. With time, however, Kotik's spontaneous ability to have such experiences is lost. The way Kotik explains his pain and bewilderment at this is a negative version of his previous closeness to the creative otherworldly forces:

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

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 them—all 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:

164

Andrei Bely

I close my eyes: I catch up to the spirits with my thoughts; there appear: — —tremblings, gleamings beneath my eyelids; I sense: the tremblings of the child's body; in the tremblings sprouts—a head; arms and chest sprout for me like grass (267: 202). Here, in the course of making a cognitive entry into a higher realm, the narrator perceives—or "remembers"—himself as a child. The light flashes are evidence of an occult experience, as can be confirmed by Notes of an Eccentric and in some of Bely s anthroposophical poetry, both of which contain references to comparable displays. Indeed this experience resembles a transition from the first to the second stage in Steiner's tripartite cognitive schema. Other instances of what might be termed "meditative curves," which lead from some initial symbol or image the narrator is contemplating to an occult insight, include his contemplation of a human skull and his invitation to the reader to imagine one (33: 22), his contemplation of a cloud (181-182: 136), and his sensation that the hemispheres of his brain are melting and preparing to take flight (271: 205). In anthroposophy, the first cognitive step the beginning adept can reach by meditating on symbols is called "imagination." As Steiner says in An Outline of Occult Science, this stage allows the individual to perceive "spiritual facts and beings to which the senses have no access." The dominant characteristic of the higher world on this level is that "a continual transformation of one thing into another" takes the place of earthly phenomena: "Birth and death are ideas that lose their significance in the imaginative world," and "In it there exist everywhere constant motion and transformation; nowhere are there points of rest." 17 In "On the Meaning of Cognition," Bely speaks of imagination as typified by a chaos of ideas, sensations, fantastic images, dreams, and the like, when "neither the world nor thought exists," and when the "crust" of familiar concepts is removed from the world and the world melts like ice (45-46). This description bears a very close resemblance to several passages in the Foreword to Kotik Letaev. There are also passages, primarily in the earlier chapters of the novel, in which the narrator describes the instability of the infant's world in a way that suggests Kotik is perceiving imaginatively: "swarm, swarm—all is swarming," "metamorphoses envelop one" (92: 66). The text also has recurring instances of imagery that is ordered in accordance with the characteristics of anthroposophical imagination. For example, Kotik sees a "professor" as "an inkling about another universe where all is still molten and to which the professor carries his deliria; he

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

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 meaning—drifts 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 are—little 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 leaflet—from 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 schémas" 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.

166

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 archangels—are thoughts; and the life of hierarchies in our thought and the life of our thought in the formations of the world—are 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 is—my 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

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized

Chinaman

167

not a verbal experience during his infancy. However, it is possible to understand the "pulse of the rhythm of the gleamings" as being a link between Kotik and the otherworldly "land of rhythm," which evokes Bely's formulations in "On the Meaning of Cognition," and, in turn, anthroposophical teaching about inspiration. The effect of a common pulse beating in Kotik and the otherworldly realm is the formation of "a passageway into another world," through which "beings of another life will pass freely into our apartment" (thus giving Kotik the insight into higher beings that inspiration is supposed to). The one being that does appear before Kotik is associated for him with the Russian vowel sound "iu" (close to the English "you"). It seems to Kotik as if the being is trying "to make" the sound out of the air, or "to sculpt" it (183-184: 137-138).

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 "Impressions—are 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 is—the music of the sphere: of the land where— — I lived before birth!

(187:140-141)

The subchapter "Impressions" in which this passage appears transcribes the adult narrator's occult investigation into his childhood—presumably the anthroposophical task that gave rise to the text as a whole. Because this section contains a description of flowing light pulses out of which forms arise, there is every reason to equate the narrator's references to "reading" with Steiner's definition of "inspiration." There is considerable charm and warmth in Kotik's childhood memories, but little of the humor, to say nothing of the satire, that was an important constituent of Petersburg, The Silver Dove, and several of the Symphonies. So it is all the more interesting to note that even in

168

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 aspires—an 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 then—would 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 are—swarms; and 'swarm, swarm—everything 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; she—is 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

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized

Chinaman

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 universe—is 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-five—which, 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 history—is 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

170

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 form—in which he returns to earlier events at the same time that Kotik grows older—results 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 Ί,' 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 Τ — 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. We—are born in God. In Christ—we die. And—we 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 domino—modeled on the anthroposophic Etheric Christ—appeared as distinctly alienated. Already in the Foreword of Kotik Letaev, Bely speaks of

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

171

that one (but who—you don't know): and—with that very same glance (what kind—you don't know) he will look, having cut through the mantles of nature; and—resounding 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 (36—37: 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) life—his 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 are—not Papa's, not—Mama'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

172

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 is—that 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 Soloviev—and implicitly Kotik himself, because of his imminent crucifixion—recalls 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"

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized

Chinaman

173

(krylorogi). Bely's striking neologism reappears throughout the text, and culminates in an extended passage in the end of the novel when Kotik's head seems to dissolve, and the two halves of his brain sprout wings and soar (268-71: 203-205). Like the idea of flight, wings of the mind suggest transcendence, which is the state Kotik is indeed experiencing in the end of the novel. Bely employs this image in "On the Meaning of Cognition" (p. 47), and in poems describing his own meditative experiences; 26 it also appears in Steiners writings. The most overt identification of Kotik with Christ occurs in the Epilogue. Bely has his alter ego anticipate "the torments of my cross," "dragging a wooden and shoulder-breaking cross," and "hanging" from "nails." These emotionally charged passages undoubtedly represent the peak of Bely's life-long quest for the true tie between the transcendent and man. As Christ, Kotik will become the living perfect mediator between heaven and earth. But although he has come very close, it is not clear that he has yet achieved the state where he will be crucified: "history has sharpened into a summit; on it . . . will be a cross; I will set it there: it will be my last step toward the vast world" (290: 220). The final image recalls the "vast astral cosmos" of which Shishnarfne speaks during his meeting with Dudkin in Petersburg. And in a way that evokes the cognitive model of contact with "thought beings" and "sound beings" in the scene between Dudkin and Shishnarfne, the narrator in Kotik Letaev gradually shifts to the cognitive significance of the images of Kotik s stages of the cross, and what will happen to him once he is figuratively crucified: My self-consciousness will be a man then, my self-consciousness is still like an infant: I will be born a second time; the ice of concepts, words, meanings—will break: many a meaning will sprout through it. (292: 222) This passage brings the novel full circle to the author's Foreword, where he spoke of the birth of self-consciousness as having been like an infant opening its eyes within him. This conclusion does not vitiate the spiral of Kotik's life, of course. If one includes his precorporeal past, his existence consists of repeated incarnations and, at the same time, a progression toward greater perfection under the influence of the "Christ impulse." Kotik's cognitive and existential experiences ultimately reflect the development of the cosmos as a whole. To understand how intuition and the individual identifying with Christ are the microcosmic variant of the crowning event in the cosmos, it would be useful to retrace briefly

174

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 cognition—that of imagination—where 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

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

175

source of power and ultimate enlightenment is neither necessary nor even possible. Everyone in the city has already arrived, or, perhaps better to say, the transcendent hovering throughout the city has already drawn all of the inhabitants into itself. In Kotik Letaev, Bely again returns to a more familiar quest pattern, but one that has become entirely internalized. 27 The use of a Steinerian cognitive methodology results in a form of contact between man and the realm of spirit that differs in an important respect from what Bely's earlier works dramatize. The narrator's memory, which has been illuminated by clairvoyance through the achievement of self-consciousness, is made to operate like a perceptive glance. The target of the narrator's memory, however, is not the external world around him, but his own childhood as recorded in an otherworldly realm. The analogy between visual perception and apprehension of the past through memory is underscored by the fact that Bely uses visual images to communicate the meaning memory produces. Thus, Kotik Letaev contains two processes by which the protagonist experiences contacts with the spiritual realm, depending on whether we have the infant's experiences or the adult's apprehension of those experiences. The first occurs spontaneously as a given of the infant's existence and results in the constitution of the world around him. The second is encapsulated in the formula "memory of memory," which is the clairvoyant adult's way of referring to the memory of having had memories of a spiritual life while an infant—memories that were subsequently lost with age. (This occult adult perspective is what distinguishes Kotik Letaev from other childhood autobiographies.) These are the memories that self-consciousness in the adult can recapture, and it is this attempt to recapture the past that is comparable to a quest. But the ontological status of these memories, which are thought processes, of course, is not simply that of purely mental images: The memory of memory is such: it is—a rhythm in which thingness is absent; dances, mimicry, gestures—are the dissolution of the shells of memory and a free passage into another world. The memories of childhood years are—my dances; these dances are—flights into what has never been, and nonetheless existing; beings of other lives have now intruded into the events of my life; and the semblances of what has been are empty vessels for me; with them I ladle up the harmony of the incomparable cosmos. (188:141) The meaning of this passage (and others like it: 22:13,112: 82,122: 90) is that through clairvoyance the adult narrator can enter into conscious contact with the land of rhythm, which the infant Kotik entered spontaneously as a function of his young age (a fact the adult also learned

176

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 past—the infant's immanent experience, which in turn is based in a cosmic past—exists eternal and unchanged. This is, in effect, Bely's personal version of the anthroposophical Akashic record—a 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.

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

177

The verbal difficulty might seem to be another consequence of Kotik Letaev s being a childhood autobiography—of the notion that children do not think in words (which have a reality for them independent of things). But the narrator also makes it clear that what is approximate about his renderings is not simply the adult's personal inability to recapture the infant's preverbal state. He acknowledges that some supreme experiences remain ultimately incommunicable. After a sequence of images dealing with the infant's perception of a scene like the Adoration of the Magi, which he sees in wood fibers in a piece of furniture, the narrator admits that what he felt was An inexpressible feeling: — —I used to recognize it subsequently, unrevealed in its poignancy, but indistinctly audible to me beneath the images and events of life—in works of art, in the din of cities; between two entryway doors; most of all—on the rib of the pyramid of Cheops . . . (78: 55) Even though the narrator can recognize in later life what he felt as a child, he still cannot communicate it. This admission recalls the narrator's essentially Romantic paean to the unutterable Russian word in The Silver Dove, and suggests Bely's return to the view of language he held before Petersburg. In the earlier works there was at most only a suggestion that fiction and reality were continuous. The narrator also addresses another kind of gap between language and reality that comes up in Kotik Letaev. A number of passages deal with the young child's literal understanding of metaphors. Kotik hears his mother say that a certain Ezheshekhinsky "flew off through a pipe," and then someone adds that this personage "is walking through fire and copper pipes" (65: 45). Both phrases are familiar Russian idioms for having had a rough time of it in life. But the child imagines Ezheshekhinsky literally wandering through pipes. This triggers Kotik's memory of his own movement through pipes before birth, as he puts it— which reminds the reader of the formation of the corridor and Letaev apartment in the beginning of the novel. The entire experience becomes Kotik's "first ponderings about the vicissitudes of fate." Kotik fits another metaphor to his own prenatal experience when he hears that "someone fell into a swoon" (75-76: 53). As he phrases it, he hears this in "a dream," which, in anthroposophy, is really an astral voyage or journey into a spiritual realm. For Kotik the metaphor means falling through the parquet floor of the Letaev apartment into the one beneath, and this is the meaning that the phrase has for him

178

Andrei Bely

henceforth. It is possible to infer, of course, that Kotik had heard this phrase in some half-waking state; the passages dealing with the swoon follow a description of his impressions of some sort of party going on in the apartment while he is in bed. But the important point is his way of supplying a meaning for the words. Falling through the floor becomes an image for his spontaneous ability to move beyond the limits of consciousness at an early age: "for me the threshold of consciousness is moveable, penetrable, openable like the floor boards of the parquet." The experiences he had when he was capable of crossing the threshold easily, however, "are not applicable to anything," and are therefore forgotten after infancy. Nevertheless, they revive later as a memory of his having had a memory of some lost experience (76: 54). These experiences in the spirit world that fade from conscious memory with age can be recaptured, of course, as the text of Kotik Letaev is meant to illustrate. The method of recovering the lost occult experience is, presumably, clairvoyant memory. This appears to be the narrators point in the conclusion of the passage dealing with the swoon, when he says that "the ancient experiences in the new conditions of life begin to old-womanize outside me and transform me—a thousand-year-old old man—into an infant." The "old woman" is a reference to the protagonist's primal prenatal experiences, and he is able to reencounter her through the "exercise of new experiences" ( 7 6 - 7 7 : 54). The process that the narrator dramatizes in these two instances of understanding metaphors literally is fully explicated in an important subchapter in the novel, entitled "Self-Consciousness." The narrator states that "an unknown word is comprehended in the recollection of its gesture; the gesture is—within me; and for words I select gestures; the world is formed out of gestures for me" (115: 84). This is basically a description of an aspect of anthroposophy known as "eurythmy." It has to do with the belief that sounds are linked to particular physical gestures of the body, which are also reflected in the movement of the tongue that produces the sounds—with all being an accurate expression of cosmologica! verities. (Glossaloliia, to which I referred above, was Bely's treatise on the subject.) Thus the narrator's statement that words are imprinted on my soul in a hieroglyph unknown to me: — —and the meaning of the sounds of a word is fragmented— —by my soul— —and [my?] understanding of the world is not fused with the word about the world (115:84) can also be applied to Kotik's encounter with such metaphors as "falling into a swoon." 3 0 He hears the words, and supplies images of physical

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized

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 words—are 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 Letaev—are characterized by a sudden decrease in this metaphysical preoccupation. Ironically, this reorientation in Bely s fiction is also prefigured in Kotik Letaev—in 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 old—the 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 view—that 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 paragraphs—the typographical texture of the prose itself—functioned 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 exist—an 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.

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

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 work—of 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 is—words; and the pulsations are—meanings" (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 minute—came 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

punctuation), especially since it is presented from the child's point of view. One is left with unanswered questions about how the appearance of guests is related to the anthroposophical formation and development of consciousness that is the focus of the work. The appearance of small-scale realistic narrative passages in the context of cosmic visions suggests that clarity, even if it betrays unmediated accuracy of representation, was important for Bely (and clarity, indeed the scientific reproducibility of occult experiences, is a hallmark of anthroposophy, or occult science). Giving in to plain prose is something like an admission of incomplete success in carrying out an artistic project, one that Bely had defined as his "anthroposophical academic task": "to truly see something of what had not been seen" in infancy. The realistic passages sit like blocks of material whose occult significance is not illuminated in a context where the constant emphasis is on the spiritual significance of things and events. Similar retreats from an esthetic tactic occurred in Bely's Fourth Symphony, but on a smaller scale. In Chapter 1 1 argued that Bely had not succeeded in infusing his elaborate imagery in the Symphony with sufficient meaning, and was then forced to add prosaic explanations to make the text more fully intelligible to the reader. Something like this occurs in Kotik Letaev, although it would be wrong to suggest that this work is as obscure as the Fourth Symphony. Indeed, Bely often succeeds brilliantly in depicting a world and state of being of swarming physical and spiritual impressions in Kotik Letaev, which is comprehensible, when the requisite effort in understanding it is made. It is also clear that the difficulty of understanding Kotik Letaev is an integral and necessary part of the work, as it was of Bely's earlier Symphonies and novels, and a consequence of the difficulty of either mastering the ideology, or acquiring the illumination that underlies it. Finally, it is possible to understand the prosaic passages as nonproblematic. Since all things on earth imply or reflect spiritual realities in an anthroposophical world view, Bely may have made the prosaic passages into highly encoded presentations of an anthroposophical cosmogony. In other words, the anthroposophy that is on the surface in many parts of the novel may disappear below the surface in the "memoiristic" passages. If this is the case, then the work cannot be fully accessible except to a true initiate of the occult science, and specifically to one who is fully conversant with Bely's unique refractions of its teachings.

The Baptized Chinaman Bely returned to his vast, autobiographical epic My Life in 1920, and

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

183

published the first chapter of the continuation in the following year, with a title that suggested what his long-range intentions were: The Crime of Nikolai Letaev. (The Epic—Volume One). The Baptized Chinaman. Chapter One. He shortened this to The Baptized Chinaman: A Novel in 1927 when he published a revised version of the chapter in book form. 32 Bely s young boyhood is the subject of the new work, which is thus an obvious sequel to Kotik Letaev. However, an important difference between the two is that Bely moves the visionary, anthroposophical imagery which dominates the earlier work into the background of the later one. Most of The Baptized Chinaman relates the child's realistic impressions of his life; only a few passages deal with the otherworldly realm. Bely even feels free to quote the descriptions of his father from The Baptized Chinaman in On the Border of Two Centuries, his official memoir of the period portrayed in the novel. 33 At the same time, a dual point of view persists throughout the work, although it differs from the one in Kotik Letaev. Since there are few visionary passages, the two dominant points of view are the conventional ones of childhood autobiography—the earthbound child and the earthbound adult. The child occasionally also has visions of something like an ancestral past, but it is not clear whether they occur thanks to the adult's ability to read the Akashic record, or because the child is simply remembering occasional moments of spontaneous clairvoyance experienced during infancy. Presumably, since the work is the putative continuation of Kotik Letaev, the former is the case. In any event, what are clearly the adult's perceptions make up the digressions and occasional asides that ironize at the child's expense. Apart from the rare occult passages in the work, what evidence is there that Bely is still operating within a world view that is a continuation of that in Kotik Letaev1 The answer lies, I believe, in the significant role that alliteration and meter play in the prose of The Baptized Chinaman. In Kotik Letaev the narrator made it clear that rhythms connect the world of spirit with the world of man. Numerous scenes depict a variety of repetitive pulses as the most fundamental means by which both information and literally creative energy were transmitted from the cosmos to Kotik, and through him, into his world. Sounds in anthroposophy fulfill a similar function; and it is likely that the numerous neologisms in the novel were there for the same purpose. Thus the appearance of passages filled with sound repetitions and a recognizable meter in The Baptized Chinaman—many pages of which are written in regular amphibrachs—is an indirect expression of an occult world view even when overt occult imagery is absent. The problem is that when the reader is presented with only such abstract and relatively mute phenomena as meter and alliteration, it becomes very difficult indeed to

184

Andrei Bely

speak of the specific nature of man's links to the transcendent. As he had done in Kotik Letaev, Bely places the same central event of his young life at the heart of The Baptized Chinaman—namely, the trauma of being torn between his parents, which leads him to identify with Christ. However, in The Baptized Chinaman Bely emphasizes a different side of this identification. In the earlier work the point of the entire narrative was a depiction of Kotik's development toward the achievement of the highest level of anthroposophical cognition—intuition, or the realization that the individual is one with Christ. Now Bely's emphasis is on the suffering he had to endure rather than the achievement of ultimate wisdom. Either The Baptized Chinaman covers a period in Bely's life during which he had been removed somehow from the path of enlightenment that was the focus of Kotik Letaev, or Bely changed to a more pessimistic tone under the influence of the ghastly hardships he had to endure in Soviet Russia in 1920.34 My guess is that the latter case is more likely, because when the narrator turned four in Kotik Letaev, which was supposed to have stopped his spontaneous contact with the spirit world, visionary passages continued as a consequence of the adult's retroactive illumination of his childhood by means of clairvoyance. Bely often communicates his pain and sense of guilt with great power: consciousness of "guilt without guilt" becomes increasingly stronger in me. I recall: — —why is it that papa yells at me when out of fright I get tangled up in my thoughts about mama, who may wake up; if you listen—you're guilty; if you don't listen—you're guilty: — —guilty without end: guilty and alone: guilty—to the end, guilty—without any reason!. . . .— —And for all this you get a ringing slap in the face! And the thread of my crime is clear to me: these nerves [of mother's]—are a consequence of difficult childbirth; I committed a crime against mother by having appeared before her; and later: I initiated discord between her and papa; self-consciousness—is criminal . . . (pp. 170-171) This is the childhood experience that explains the original title of the work, The Crime of Nikolai Letaev.35

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

185

-2-

The change to the final title of the work is difficult to understand, as is the function of the Asiatic imagery in the novel as a whole. On a number of occasions, the narrator describes his father—who is obviously a portrait of Bely's own father—as having "Scythian" features (pp. 7, 35, 94,154), or as recalling a Chinese who has fathomed the wisdom of the I Ching (p. 21), or as Zoroaster (p. 141). Near the end of the novel, after relating the charming story of his father's dream of Christ, in which Christ agrees with the father's eccentric philosophical system, Kotik concludes: "Papa is probably a baptized Chinaman!" Although this makes clear that the change in titles indicates an apparent shift in focus from the narrator to his father, or to the narrator's relation to his father, the meaning of this shift remains unclear. The apocalyptic meaning of Asia in Petersburg makes it tempting to hypothesize that the references to Asia in The Baptized Chinaman have a comparable significance, despite the fact that they were totally absent from Kotik Letaev. Thus the narrator's father as a baptized Chinaman may be an echo of Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, whose ancestor was a baptized Mongol. It is likely, however, that the frequent references to Scythians specifically refer to a Russian cultural and political movement known as Scythianism and associated with the social and literary critic IvanovRazumnik. D. S. Mirsky characterizes it succinctly as a "sort of mystical revolutionary messianism, laying great stress on the revolutionary mission of Russia and on the fundamental difference of Socialist Russia from the bourgeois West."36 The Bolshevik Revolution was perceived by the Scythians as a manifestation of the new world and order to come. (Aleksandr Blok's poem "The Scythians" [1918] is a well-known expression of this ideology). Bely was close friends with Ivanov-Razumnik for a long time, is known to have found his ideas congenial, 37 and first published Kotik Letaev in his almanac The Scythians. But even without this connection, it is clear that the significance of Asia has changed for Bely since Petersburg because the apocalypse as such is no longer his central concern in The Baptized Chinaman.38 Indeed, the significance of things Scythian in the novel could be characterized as more broadly occult and diffuse than something as specific as the end of world history. In general, Scythian imagery recalls the narrator's prenatal cosmic existence in Kotik Letaev. But the achievement of self-consciousness is not an overt theme in The Baptized Chinaman, and since the narrator had lost spontaneous contact with the spirit world at the age of four, the fact that he continues to have occasional occult experiences in The Baptized Chinaman could be

186

Andrei Bely

understood as inconsistencies on Bely's part, or as natural but rare events that constitute exceptions to the rule. The narrator's occult visions in The Baptized Chinaman arise primarily during moments of emotional turmoil. He speaks of the moral blows his parents exchanged being like the impacts of two lead spheres against his "weak, five-year old body." The result was that "I—was pushed out into what lay beyond my skin by the squeezing of nightmare; and the sensation of destruction—grew stronger: in the collapse of physical, psychic, and moral foundations" (pp. 168-169). A hysterical outburst from the narrator's mother leads to an especially painful scene with the father that, in turn, prompts a complex sequence of images revolving around a Scythian slaying a Persian. This violent image was awakened somehow in the narrator's imagination by his father's practice of smashing a rusty nail into a metal washbasin in order to "tame" his wife, who, as a result of the hideous noise, inevitably collapses into tears (p. 153). The horror of the scene apparently causes the narrator to faint, and this is when he sees his father in the guise of an enraged Scythian on horseback. The narrator then begins to identify with this vision himself: —the galloping [of the Scythian] became bound together through a compaction of the dust; compact dust—is my body; and it gallops in my little chest, it gallops in my little head; and I am torn asunder in the galloping of thought, the galloping of the heart; — —thus in the body: — in mine! — —a race through the minutes occurs: of the dead Persian, and of the wild Scythian; the hooves pound; in my little breast—there's a growing lump, a bloody lump: my Scythian! — (p. 156) In this passage the rhythm (of a "gallop") takes on a material substance that is the narrator himself ("compact dust—is my body"). This recalls the fundamental pattern of the relationship between the spiritual and material worlds in Petersburg and Kotik Letaev, where the former created the latter. Moreover, the narrator's reference to a "growing lump" in his heart echoes the expanding crimson sphere in Apollon Apollonovich's chest, although, again, here the image is not apocalyptic. The importance of rhythm as the primary link between man and the otherworldly realm is further underscored in this passage by the fact that in the Russian original it is composed entirely of perfect amphibrachs. This passage also hints at an occult dimension in the novel because it seems to be concerned with reincarnation. According to Steiner, intu-

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

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 event—ancient, 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

central regenerative force in the cosmos. This page is also of particular interest because it has one of the most striking typographical arrangements in Bely's entire canon. The narrator's text, as he speaks of Christ as a "sun Disk,"suddenly splits into two separate columns of print, each containing a different sentence. One speaks of the "Christ Being"'s body entering "like a Sword into the world's / Nothingness!," the other of it entering "like a Sword into the world's / Everything!" Following this, the text merges into a funnel-shape that narrows toward the bottom of the page as the narrator speaks of the occult, archangelic names of the anthroposophical Christ's attributes (p. 217). The entire typographical design thus describes the movement toward an ultimate unity in Christ of everything in the cosmos—a view that typifies anthroposophical teaching as a whole. In a suggestive but somewhat unclear study of the first version of the novel (The Crime of Nikolai Letaev), written from what appears to be an anthroposophical point of view, A. Veksler identifies a number of parallels between alliterations and what Bely claimed was the mystical significance of certain sounds in his Glossalolia—parallels that generally support the overt themes of the novel. Veksler's comments also underline how hermetic anthroposophy, or Bely's refraction of it, can be—a feature that effectively blocks the uninitiated from understanding it. For example, analyzing the important motif "the axis of days revolves, the shadow of shadows" (vrashchaetsia vereteri dnei, ten' tenei), Veksler finds that the dominance of the letter "t" (in the Russian) is indicative of "immobilized shadows, as yet nonexistent, not manifested." The "d" that appears shows "the becoming that has become; it is any kind of form (of things, plants, and thoughts)." The "n" suggests "the flying by of spectralness," and the "v" is "the sound of howling chaos which blows through empty form and gives rise to shadows." "R," which is only "hinted at" in the motif is the "sound of rupture, the sound of consciousness, the sound of explosive reason—this is the sound of 'papa'." The meaning that emerges from this and other combinations of sounds suggests to Veksler a tension between formlessness and form— the maternal and paternal poles in the novel, respectively—that Kotik resolves at the novel's end through his entry into temporality and his ultimate identification with Christ. As Veksler explains it: By his birth, Kotik divides papa and mama in half; before him there was a holistic, mutual interpenetrating [do nego bylo tsel'noe, vzaimoproniknutoe]; he must unite them, uniting them within himself in a new way—by means of papa's light to transform mama . . . and mama's sins—are his sins, because on him lies responsibility for his mother. 40

Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman

189

One should add that Veksler's analysis conforms neatly with Steiners teachings about Ahriman and Lucifer—the spirits of form and formlessness, respectively—and 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 became—a 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

pane. Now, however, a person appears on a mirrored glass surface as a reified exhalation from what may be a spiritual dimension. Moreover, Bely uses the same tactic to suggest the ultimately mysterious origins of the nanny as he had in the First Symphony. He does not specify the subjects of the verbs that indicate how she arose, and simply says "[they] breathed [nadyshali]" Henrietta Martynovna; "someone exhaled"; "[they] breathed again [dokhnuli eshche]." This general process (designated as cerebral play in Petersburg) is also at work in the narrator's reference to the "fleetfooted conjectures [that] run out of my head through the rooms." O n e of these actually appears to take on a momentary existence and "sucks everything out of me, pouring it into himself" (p. 50). The independent state of being of this "conjecture" recalls that of Dudkin after he springs from Apollon Apollonovich's head. The otherworldly origin of such thoughts is suggested by the narrator's reference later in the novel to "Socrates' demon, Leonardo da Vinci's silent one" (p. 204), and, especially, "the elohim" (p. 210) who live in his father. The latter are spiritual beings that have special significance in anthroposophy. And if they reside in the father, they may also pass through the son before assuming life outside him. The narrator's life continues to be cyclical in this novel, as it had been in Kotik Letaev, and in the earlier works as suggested by the experiences of characters. There are numerous references to reincarnations in which characters enact familiar events from past lives. Thus, in addition to having been a Persian, the narrator was a Hebrew in Sinai and draws a parallel between his fear of transgression against both parents and the constraints of the Mosaic Commandments (p. 214). The struggles between the parents are represented as reenactments of the quarrels of Xanthippe and Socrates. The father also is said to have lived in ancient Rome and Palestine (p. 215). The difference between the cyclical shape of time in this work and the spiraling time in those preceding it is that the teleological component that converts cycles into whorls of a spiral is muted in The Baptized Chinaman. The narrator's identification with the transcendence that Christ represented earlier has become significantly weaker.

Conclusion

From the perspective of the mainstream of modern Western culture, Bely's fiction from the First Symphony to The Baptized Chinaman is part of a major countercurrent. Descartes, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Darwin, and Nietzsche are some of the points on the curve culminating in the widespread image of modern man as alienated from any center of gravity that would draw him into being a part of a greater whole. By contrast, all Russian and European Symbolists, despite the wide divergences among them, shared a common faith in a holistic apprehension of existence—an idea inherent in the Greek verb symballein, meaning "to throw together," from which "symbol" is derived. Thus, while various systems of belief that had once integrated man into a religious, political, or historical context were being rapidly eroded, Symbolists still tried to act as if "the world is wide and yet . . . like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars."1 In this formulation (one that is particularly apt for Bely) Georg Lukács is speaking of the Homeric epic sensibility, which he contrasts with that of the novel—the epic of the fallen world. The European novel's association from its beginnings in Don Quixote with a poignant sense that the unity between man and his world has been lost makes the novel the modern genre par excellence. This feature also underscores the difference between Bely's Symbolist prose and the main European novelistic tradition. It is of course only on a high level of abstraction that the unity Symbolism sought to reestablish can be compared to that of the epic, or, indeed, to analogous views of existence such as those implicit in the great religions, and, at least in theory, in "socialist realism," which can be said to aspire to the epic. The generic differences between Symbolist

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 à Cythère" 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 François 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. Mallarmé 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-siècle 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 symbolism—denotes 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

burg go so far as to transform the symbolic perceptions that the narrator-author fixes in words into "events" that the reader can perceive for himself. The problem of symbolic perceptions embodied in a text being at best one step removed from the author's own experiences—and, thereby, not truly communicable as symbolic perceptions to the reader—is thus eliminated (but conditional on accepting what Bely believed, of course). In Bakhtin's terms, Bely's conception of the language produced by cerebral play is a reversion to ancient mythological or magical forms of thinking in which language and mythic imagery are completely interdependent: language gives birth to mythic reality, and, in turn, is controlled by mythic imagery. 2 This is in fact close to what Bely himself said of symbolic language in the essay "The Magic of Words." In a similar vein, the elaborate occult imagery in Kotik Letaev could conceivably be read as an extended metaphor for a young child's confusion in a world that is new for him, even if there is abundant evidence within and outside the work that this is not how Bely saw it. The child's attempt to order chaos is undoubtedly an important part of the novel. But to deny the relevance of an anthroposophic world view for understanding Kotik Letaev would be to flatten the work. And there is undeniable profit and pleasure in entering, even conditionally, a conception of existence drastically different from that held by most readers. Because Bely's world view is anachronistic, it is a constant temptation to speak of approaches to him in terms also relevant to works and writers from the distant past. More recent writers, like the "God seekers" Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, do not seem comparable because, to quote Andrei Siniavsky, "to seek means not to have. He who has, he who truly believes, does not seek." 3 To choose one final example, the Divine Comedy can be read from the point of view of what punishments Dante meted out to contemporaries in the various circles of the Inferno, or from the perspective of his skill in manipulating terza rima, or in order to trace the uses to which he put Virgilian epic traditions. Analogous formal and thematic concerns can be profitably pursued in all of Bely's works. But it would be as limiting to deny the stamp of Bely's beliefs on all aspects of his work as it would be to ignore Dante's faith in a link between man and the transcendent.

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: Éditions l'âge 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 Propyläen 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 ν 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 Propyläen 47) p. 352. 8. See Georges Nivat, "Lettres d'Andrej Belyj à la famille d'Asja'," Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 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. Frédéric Κοζlik (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 Propyläen 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

1. Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), especially chap. II, "The Symbolistic Imagination" (pp. 44-76), which contains a far-reaching theoretical discussion of Symbolism in general. The quotation is from p. 56. 2. This distinction has been made well, and subsumed in a larger argument, by Mikhail Bakhtin in his important study "Discourse in the Novel": "Slovo ν romane" (1934-35), in his Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), pp. 72-233.1 follow Roger Keys ("Symbolism in the Novel, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 19 [Jan. 1983], 43-57) in finding Bakhtin's treatment of this question useful. 3. See John Simon, "Prose poem (poem in prose)," in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Enlarged Edition, ed. A. Preminger, et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 664. 4. Melvin J. Friedman, "The Symbolist Novel: Huysmans to Malraux," in Modernism: 1890-1930, ed. M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 454. 5. The discussion that follows derives from the excellent short monograph by Karl D. Uitti, The Concept of Self in the Symbolist Novel (The Hague: Mouton, 1961). 6. "O simvolizme," Trudy i dni, 2 (March-April 1912), 6-7. (Belyi mistakenly joined two names in this essay and wrote "Leconte de Lisle Adam" instead of either "Leconte de Lisle" or the more likely name of the author of Axel). Belyi describes his introduction to French Symbolism by Ol'ga Solov'ev in Vospominaniia o Bloke (Moscow-Berlin, 1922-23; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propyläen 47), p. 14; and his early preference for German and Scandinavian authors over the French in his memoir Nachalo veka (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933; rpt. Chicago: Russian Language Specialties, 1966), p. 111.

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 Propyläen 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 Böhme, 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 ν 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 Propyläen 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 Propyläen 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 à Ivanov-Razumnik" in Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 15 (Jan.-June 1974), 54-55. 33. Cited by Elena Silard, Ό 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. Α. 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 (η. 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. Α. 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

teresting examples of Belyi's early writings as an appendix to his study. Belyi's comments in Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, which Lavrov quotes, appear on pp. 352, 339. 42. Avramenko, "'Simfonii'," p. 55. 43. "Andrej Belyj: Lettre autobiographique à Ivanov-Razumnik," 53. 44. L. Grossman, "Posledniaia poema Turgeneva," in Venok Turgenevu, 1818-1918: Sbornikstatei (Odessa: Knigoizdatel'stvo Ivasenko, 1919), pp. 5790. 45. The full title of the work, which was Belyi's first publication, is Simfoniia (2-aia, dramaticheskaia), but for convenience I will refer to it as the Second Symphony throughout this study. All page references given in the text are from the Fink reprint cited in note 8 above. Belyi describes the circumstances surrounding his literary debut, including the invention of his pseudonym by Mikhail Solov'ev, in Nachaio veka, p. 128. 46. L. K. Dolgopolov comes to the same conclusion in "Tvorcheskaia istoriia i istoriko-literaturnoe znachenie romana A. Belogo 'Peterburg'," in Peterburg by Andrei Belyi, Literaturnye pamiatniki (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), p. 530. 47. "Simvolizm, kak miroponimanie," Arabeski, pp. 220-222. 48. See, for example, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, pp. 482-483. 49. Nachaio veka, pp. 122-123. 50. Letter to Emiiii Metner (Medtner), fragments of which were published by Georges Nivat, "Histoire d'une 'Tératogénèse' Biélyenne: Les rapports entre Emilij Medtner et Andrej Belyj," Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 18 (Jan.-June 1977), 96. 51. In his memoir Nachaio veka, Belyi speaks of "three sides" rather than "three meanings," p. 121. 52. Ibid., pp. 119, 122. 53. Avramenko quotes from Belyi's "Materials for a Biography" (p. 61). More relevant passages from this unpublished autobiography appear in the Notes to the Biblioteka poeta edition of Belyi's poetry: Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1966), p. 622. 54. Vospominaniia o Bloke, p. 28. 55. Assuming there is no typographical error, this name differs in only one letter from that of Aleksei Sergeevich Petrovskii—a close friend of Belyi's—and may thus be an encoded nod by a young author to someone from his inner circle. 56. A. Lavrov, "Iunosheskie dnevnikovye zametki Andreia Belogo," pp. 125, 133. 57. An echo of V. Solov'ev's attack on Tolstoi in his preface to the Three Conversations is heard in what one of the beings says about knocking a length of pipe into the ground and showing the emptiness inside to fools. Solov'ev has compared Tolstois version of Christianity to a sect he had once read about called vertidyrniki (hole twisters) or dyromoliai (hole prayers), who, if Solov'ev is to be taken seriously, bored holes in the walls of their homes and prayed into them: izba moia, dyra moia, spasi menia (my hut, my hole, save me). This

Notes to Pages 3 8 - 4 3

201

degree of "simplification" reminded Solov'ev of Tolstois modifications of Christianity, which, of course, Solov'ev attacks in his fictional "conversations." See "Ot avtora", in his Tri razgovora (St. Petersburg, 1900; rpt. New York: Chekhov, 1954), pp. 20-21. Belyi obviously knew of Solov'ev's attack: see his essay "F. Sologub" (1908) reprinted in Lug zelenyi, pp. 160,176. It is also worth mentioning that several numbered paragraphs in the scene between Musatov and the demons (pp. 308-309) are the longest in the entire Symphony and read like normal prose paragraphs. A departure from the norm of short paragraphs of course calls attention to the content. 58. See, for example, Belyi's Odna iz obitelei tsarstva tenei (Leningrad, 1924; rpt. Letchworth, Herts., England: Prideaux, 1971), where he turns "Negro" influences on decadent Western civilization into an image of proto-apocalyptic spiritual depravity (pp. 44-46, 51-54). 59. Nikolai Berdiaev has written of Belyi's Petersburg as a "cubist" novel in which spiritual dimensions can be visualized as participating in planar forms: "Astral'nyi roman (Razmyshleniia po povodu romana A. Belogo 'Peterburg')," Krizis i iskusstvo, 12 (1918), 36-46. This appealing and perceptive metaphor can also be applied to the Second Symphony. Elena Silard, Ό strukture Vtoroi simfonii A. Belogo," Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 13 (1967), 311-322, focuses on the fragmentation of the Second Symphony, which she finds to be the characteristic that distinguishes it from nineteenth-century fiction; however, she does not give adequate attention to the metaphysical unities in the work. 60. See Roman Jakobson, "The Prose of the Poet Pasternak," (1935), in Pasternak: Modern Judgments, ed. Donald Davie et al. (Nashville: Aurora, 1970), pp. 135-151; or his section "The Metaphoric and Metonymie Poles," in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, 2nd rev. ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 90-96. Sigurd Fasting makes similar use of Jakobson's ideas: "Andrej Belyj's Simfonia. 2-aja dramaticeskaja," Scando-Slavica, 25 (1979), 37-55. 61. Quoted by his widow, K. N. Bugaeva, Vospominaniia o Belom, ed. annotated and introd., by John E. Malmstad (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1981), p. 239. 62. For examples of rhythmic passages and alliteration see Silard, Ό strukture Vtoroi simfonii A. Belogo," pp. 319-320. Silard also makes an attempt to analyze Belyi's rhythms in the Second Symphony and trace their dependence on Nietzsche, in her Ό vliianii ritmiki prozy F. Nitsshe na ritmiku prozy A. Belogo," pp. 307-313. 63. Nachalo veka, p. 40. 64. The quotation from a letter by Sergei Solov'ev is cited by Vladimir Orlov in his edition of Aleksandr Blok-Andrei Belyi: Perepiska (Moscow, 1940; rpt. Munich: Fink, 1969 as Slavische Propyläen 65), p. 63 n. 6. For an excellent description of Bely's melding of life and art at the beginning of the century, to the extent that his personal letters and portions of "fictional" works were interchangeable, see Α. V. Lavrov "Mifotvorchestvo 'Argonavtov' " in Mif, fol'klor, literatura, ed. V. G. Bazanovet al. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), pp. 137-170.

202

Notes to Pages 4 3 - 4 8

65. Nachalo veka, p. 11. 66. Quoted by Α. V. Lavrov, "Iunosheskie dnevnikovye zametki Andreia Belogo," pp. 120-121. 67. There is a tendency among readers of Belyi, especially of his Second Symphony, to see his satire against mystical excess as an unconscious attack upon himself (for example, Ivanov-Razumnik, Vershiny: Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi [Peterburg: Kolos, 1923], pp. 41-43). However, Belyi's comment about the comic in music makes clear that he was capable of preserving his own ideals untarnished at the same time that he lambasted those who fell short of them. 68. Attempts have been made to draw more detailed parallels between the large scale structure of Belyi's Symphony and the traditional parts of the sonata form, but this is a topic that lies outside my competence and purview. See Simon Karlinsky, "Symphonic Structure in Andrej Belyj's 'Pervoe svidanie'," in California Slavic Studies, VI, ed. Robert P. Hughes et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 61-70, and especially pp. 63-64; see also Kovac, Andrej Belyj, pp. 153-158. However, Belyi himself admits in the Preface to the Fourth Symphony (cited above) that he had no very clear idea of the musical form when he wrote the three Symphonies. 69. The full title of the work is Vozvrat. Ill simfoniia (The Return. Ill Symphony), but for convenience I will refer to it as the Third Symphony throughout this study. All page references given in the text are from the Fink reprint of the Symphony's first edition cited in note 8 above. Pagination begins anew for the Third Symphony in the Fink reprint. 70. For a more detailed plot summary, as well as a useful attempt to analyze the Third Symphony from the point of view of the sonata form, see Kovac, Andrej Belyj, pp. 174-184ff. S. Karlinsky ("Symphonic Structure," p. 64) comments in passing on the Symphony's musical structure as a "vast one-movement sonata-allegro." 71. In his memoirs, Belyi referred to Khandrikov only as one who was going mad (Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, p. 403). Belyi also recalled with pride how a doctor told him that Khandrikov's growing insanity was described with surprising realism (Nachalo veka, p. 368). However, both comments need to be placed in the proper context of Belyi making an obvious and even desperate attempt to accommodate himself to the Soviet regime. The essays, works of belles-lettres, and other evidence from Belyi's youth (see also his memoirs of Blok for example, which were published at a less repressive time and place) amply contradict the image of himself that he tried to publicize in the years before his death. Moreover, in Belyi's world view, "madness" did not at all preclude an idealistic conception of existence, or canonize a purely materialistic explanation of a person's psychological state. The idea that a madman has been singled out by divinity, or has risen above the herd, has a venerable history in Russian and Western culture, and can be found in Nietzsche's works as well as in his life. Belyi himself referred to Nietzsche's madness as a sign of his having been touched by the transcendent (see, for example, "Fridrikh Nitsshe" [1907] in Arabeski, pp. 60-90). For more on Belyi's conception of all great prophets and

Notes to Pages 48-59

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 simple—an interpretation that goes against the grain of everything that Belyi held dear—see 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 ν 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

Notes to Pages 60-68

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, Vorträge des VII Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für moderne Sprachen und Literaturen in Heidelberg (Heidelberg: Universitäts 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.

2. The Silver Dove 1. For a summary of the novel's writing and publication history see K. Bugaeva and A. Petrovskii, "Literaturnoe nasledstvo Andreia Belogo," in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 27-28 (Moscow: Zhurnal'no gazetnoe ob'edinenie, 1937), pp. 599-600. All page and volume references to the Russian text will be given in the body of this book and refer to the reprint Serebrianyi golub' (Berlin, 1922; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967, as Slavische Propyläen 38). Quotations will be given in the new orthography. The sole English translation of the novel is by George Reavey: Andrey Bely, The Silver Dove (New York: Grove Press, 1974). Page references to Reavey's translation will be given in the text following the Russian volume and page reference, but the translation used here is my own.

Notes to Pages 68-83

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 Propyläen 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

Notes to Pages 85-96

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 Propyläen 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 Propyläen 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, "Erzähler und Raum des Erzählers 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

Notes to Pages 97-100

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 Propyläen), 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 Propyläen 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 Propyläen 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

9. Ibid., "Maglia slov," pp. 429-430. 10. Ibid., p. 446. 11. "Emblematika smysla," Simvolizm, p. 73. 12. Ibid., pp. 70, 71, 102, 105, 112-13. Belyi also discusses a similar relationship between the "Symbol" and "symbols" in the earlier essay "O tselesoobraznosti" (1905; rpt. Arabeski, p. 107), but, if I understand him correctly, without making all human activities products of the Absolute. 13. "Emblematika smysla," Simvolizm, pp. 106, 132. Since Belyi says elsewhere in Simvolizm that all art from all ages is symbolic, he must believe that all artists have always been agents of the transcendent. (Whether this is also true of all human beings is, on the basis of Belyi's essays, something of a moot question). Cioran (p. 67) makes the useful formulation that Belyi's symbolism was in fact apocalyptic, "for it depends upon those supernatural forces which will create the world anew in the Second Coming of Christ." This explains why Belyi is his theory spoke of present day "symbolization" rather than the higher "symbolism" of the future. 14. "Emblematika smysla," Simvolizm, p. 71. 15. Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, p. 181. 16. "Problema kul'tury," Simvolizm, p. 10. 17. Ibid., "Emblematika smysla," p. 140. 18. "Krizis soznaniia i Genrikh Ibsen," Arabeski, p. 198. 19. See Elsworth's insightful discussion in Studies in Twentieth Century Russian Literature, pp. 30-33. He also traces other philosophical influences on Belyi. On the role of Nietzsche in the novel see Virginia Bennett, "Echoes of Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy in Andrej Belyj's Petersburg,"GermanoSlavica, 3 (Fall 1980), 243-259; and Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, "Belyjs 'Petersburg' und Nietzsches 'Geburt der Tragödie'," Nietzsche-Studien: Internationales Jahrbuch für die Nietzsche-Forschung, 9, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), pp. 356-373. 20. Vospominaniia o Bloke (Moscow-Berlin, 1922-23; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), p. 210. 21. A vast work on this subject has appeared. Frédéric Kozlik, L'Influence de l'anthroposophie sur l'oeuvre d'Andrei Biélyi, 3 vols. (Frankfurt: Rita G. Fischer Verlag, 1981). Unfortunately, however, the author is less sensitive to Belyi's texts than he is to anthroposophical ideas, so this 1000-page-long study sheds hardly any light on Belyi's art or his involvement with Steiner. 22. Belyi's first personal meeting with Steiner seems to have won him over to anthroposophy. In his letter to Blok of 14 May 1912, in which he describes the meeting in detail, Belyi also traces his growing interest in Steiners ideas, and contrasts this with his antipathy toward theosophy. See letter 242 in Aleksandr Blok-Andrei Belyi: Perepiska, ed. Vladimir Orlov (Moscow, 1940; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propyläen 65), pp. 293-295. See also the memoir of Belyi by D. Maksimov, Ό torn kak ia videi i slyshal Andreia Belogo," Zvezda, 7 (July 1982), 167-178, who recalls how Belyi admitted that "Steiners strength wasn't in [his] books, but in personal contact, in direct influence." Belyi's widow, also a dedicated anthroposophist, confirmed to Maksimov that Steiner s forte was personal teaching: "The Doctor didn't know

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. Frédéric 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 ( Ό 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 à la famille d' 'Asja'," Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 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. ν and ff.). 31. Pochemu ia stai simvolistom, p. 94. 32. Nivat, "Lettres d'Andrej Belyj à 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 Ästhetik und Poetik des Russischen Symbolismus (Göttingen: 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 (Düsseldorf: 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 Hönig, 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 Cérébral,' Etude sur Pétersbourg," Pétersbourg, 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

41. Κ. Ν. Bugaeva, Vospominaniia o Belom, ed., annotated and introd. by John E. Malmstad (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1981), p. 101. 42. On "lotus flowers" see Steiner, Occult Science, p. 302. The quotation is from p. 76. It is also interesting to note that Belyi's description in Nachalo veka (p. 165) of Briusov reading poetry recalls Shishnarfne's fading to two dimensions, and so does Belyi's description of himself as a "black contour" when, after some spiritual transformation, he "turned himself inside out." See his letter to Medtner from 1903, published by Nivat in "Historie d'une 'Tératogénèse' Biélyenne: Les rapports entre Emilij Medtner et Andrej Belyj," Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 18, (Jan.-June 1977), 99. 43. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, trans. G. Metaxa, ed. Harry Collison (New York: Anthroposophie Press, n. d.), p. 146. Maguire and Malmstad (pp. 346-347) also read "enfranshish" as an approximate transliteration from the Latin alphabet. They accept O. Ronen's hypothesis, however, that "En franchise" is related to Dudkin's subliminal recollection of advertisements in newspapers of the time for insect powder (known as "Persian powder" in Russian). They also note that the first third of the visitor's name is the Russian word for a vulgar gesture. Hönig observes that Shishnarfne is an anagram with 362,880 permutations (pp. 67-68). Kozlik argues that this figure is mistaken and calculates only 90,720 permutations (II, 475). 44. Stepka's reaction to Shishnarfne counters Holthusens argument (Studien, p. 134) that Shishnarfne exists only in Dudkin's imagination. The entire confrontation between Dudkin and Shishnarfne recalls the famous scene between Ivan and his devil in The Brothers Karamazov, but with the important difference that Dostoevskii does not have a third party present. This is only one of the numerous literary allusions in Petersburg. Others are identified and discussed in Maguire and Malmstad's notes to their translation; in L. K. DolgopoIov's notes to the 1978 and 1979 Soviet reprints of the 1928 edition of Petersburg, and in the 1981 reprint of the 1916 edition; in Nivat's afterword to the French translation; in Ada Steinberg's "On the Structure of Parody in Andrej Belyj's Peterburg," Slavica Hierosolymitana, 1 (1977), 132-157 (reprinted, with changes, in Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], pp. 162-191); and her "Fragmentary 'Prototypes' in Andrey Bely s Novel Peterburg," Slavonic and East European Review, 36 (October 1978), 522-545. Belyi discusses echoes of Gogol' in his own Masterstvo Gogolia, (Moscow, 1934; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969, as Slavische Propyläen 59), pp. 298 passim. 45. In the 1916 edition of the novel, p. 240, Belyi had included a sentence describing the agent and Nikolai going off in different directions between the agent's words and the narrator's apostrophe. 46. Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, pp. 91-98. 47. See "Iz literaturnogo nasledstva Andreia Belogo: Vospominaniia, torn III, chast' II (1910-1912)," in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 27-28, pp. 453-454; and Ljunggren's The Dream of Rebirth (pp. 32-33) for a quotation from unpublished drafts of Belyi's memoirs. 48. This is precisely the way Belyi experienced the "birth" of Moscow, as an act of violent force exerted against his own will. Moreover, both he and his

Notes to Pages 122-132

213

wife saw the characters from the novel as "more real than any reality." See K. N. Bugaeva, Vospominaníia o Beìom, pp. 146-147. 49. Letter to Medtner, excerpt published by Nivat in "Histoire d'une 'Tératogénèse' Biélyenne," 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 cérébral," (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 'Tératogénèse' Biélyenne," 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 'Tératogénèse' Biélyenne," p. 104. 58. See Aleksandr Blok-Andrei Belyi: Perepiska, pp. 264, 269. 59. See Georges Nivat, "Du 'Panmongolisme' au 'Mouvement Eurasien': Histoire d'un thème littéraire," Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 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

214

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 cérébral" (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 Frédéric 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

215

modernists." See his "Budem iskat' melodii," in Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, p. 547. 77. Cosmic Memory, p. 184. 78. Steiner, Occult Science, p. 343. 79. For another survey of the coat of arms' associations, see Maria Carlson, "The Ableukhov Coat of Arms," in Andrey Bely: Centenary Papers, pp. 157170,181.

4. Kotik Letaev and The Baptized Chinaman 1. Belyi also called the work a "Symphonic tale [povest1]." For the various generic characterizations, the publication history of Kotik Letaev, and the work's place in Belyi's complex literary plans, see K. Bugaeva and A. Petrovskii, "Literaturnoe nasledstvo Andreia Belogo" in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 2728 (Moscow: Zhurnal'no gazetnoe ob"edinenie, 1937), pp. 604-606. Page references in the text are to the following edition of the novel: Kotik Letaev (Petrograd: Epokha, 1922; rpt. Munich: Eidos Verlag, 1964). The second page reference in each pair of references is to the English translation by Gerald Janecek (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1971), but the translation used here is my own. In several instances I have used Janecek's apt translations for Belyi's expressions and neologisms: "conswarmings" for "sroennost' " (64:45); "fall into a swoon" for "upast' ν obmorok" (75:53); "old-womanize" for "starushit'sia" (76: 54); "the live-flowing lightscript" for "zhivotechnaia svetopis " (116: 85); and "frockcoater" for "siurtuchnik" (188: 141). 2. Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930; rpt. Letchworth, Herts.,: England: Bradda, 1966), p. 165. Belyi makes the same claim in a Preface to the novel that he wrote in 1928 and that was first published in Novyi zhurnal, 101 (1970), 69-70. 3. Zapiski chudaka, 2 vols. (Moscow-Berlin, 1922; rpt. Lausanne: Editions l'âge d'homme, 1973), I, p. 46. Belyi's letter to Ivanov-Razumnik was published by Georges Nivat as "Andrej Belyj: Lettre autobiographique á Ivanov-Razumnik," in Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 15 (Jan.-June 1974), 74-75. Pochemu ia stai simvolistom i pochemu ia ne perestal im byt' vo vsekh fazakh moego ideinogo i khudozhestvennogo razvitiia (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982), p. 9. 4. For a key to the actual identities of the people Belyi hid behind fictional names see Dmitrij Tschizewskij's "Erläuterungen" in the 1964 reprint of Kotik cited in n. 1 (pp. xiv-xvi). 5. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man (Die Geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit, 1911) ed. Henry B. Monges, no trans. (Spring Valley, New York: The Anthroposophie Press, 1950), p. 6. 6. For more on the spiral see Gerald Janecek, "The Spiral as Image and Structural Principle in Andrej Belyj's Kotik Letaev," Russian Literature, 4 (October 1976), 357-364. 7. For a good discussion of the novel's style see Georges Nivat, "Le palimpseste de l'enfance" in Kotik Létaiev, by Andrei Belyi, trans, by G. Nivat (Lausanne: Editions l'âge d'homme, 1973), pp. 282-288. 8. See Shklovskii's "Andrei Belyi," Russkii sovremennik: Literaturno-khudozhestvennyizhurnal, 2 (1924), 231-245.

216

Notes to Pages 1 5 6 - 1 7 5

9. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, 1909) trans, by Maud and Henry B. Monges, rev. by Lisa D. Monges (Spring Valley, New York: Anthroposophie Press, 1972), pp. 338-339. 10. K. N. Bugaeva makes this connection openly in her memoir Vospominaniia o Belom, ed., annotated and introd. by John E. Malmstad (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1981), p. 52. See Also Belyi's memoir, Vospominaniia o Shteinere, ed. Frédéric Kozlik (Paris: La Presse Libre, 1982), p. 220. 11. Ό smysle poznaniia" (Petersburg: Epokha, 1922) was reprinted together with "Poeziia slova" (Chicago: Russian Language Specialties, 1965). Page references to the reprint of the essay will be given in the text. 12. Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo pisatelei, 1934), p. 211. 13. Gerald Janecek provides another anthroposophical reading of Kotik Le~ taev, based directly on Steiners own writings rather than on Belyi's refraction of them, which is analogous to mine: "Anthroposophy in Kotik Letaev," Orbis Literarum, 29 (1974), 245-267. 14. Zapiski chudaka, I, p. 93. See Belyi's Vospominaniia o Shteinere (between pp. 36 and 37) for photographs of the first Goetheanum. 15. See Belyi's essay "Zhezl Aarona (O Slove ν poezii)" (Skify, Sbornik I-i, 1917) for a discussion of the connection between rhythm and meaning on the example of Tiutchev's poetry (pp. 201-203). 16. Steiner, Spiritual Guidance, pp. 14-15. 17. Steiner, Occult Science, pp. 271-272, 303-304. 18. Nivat, "Lettre autobiographique," p. 75; Pochemu ia stai simvolistom, p. 10.

19. Steiner, Occult Science, pp. 304-307. 20. Ibid., pp. 309-311. 21. Ibid., p. 344. 22. See Rudolf Steiner, The Fifth Gospel, (Seven lectures in Oslo and Cologne, 1913), rev. trans, by C. Davy and D. S. Osmond (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968), p. 151. 23. Steiner, Occult Science, p. 345. 24. See Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, p. 181. 25. Christ, Solov'ev, and Steiner were linked later by Belyi as well. In his Vospominaniia o Shteinere, p. 335, after describing the enormous effect Steiner's lecture series (published later as The Fifth Gospel) had on him in 1913, Belyi remembers that his thoughts turned back to the beginning of the century and visits to Solov'ev's grave. 26. See, for example, "Dukh" (1914) in Andrei Belyi, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, Biblioteka poeta (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1966), pp. 372-373. 27. See Anna Lisa Crone, "Gnostic Elements in Belyjs Kotik Letaev," Russian Language Journal, 36 (1982), 88-105, for a Gnostic reading of Kotik's quest. This study, although illuminating a number of images in the novel, does not take sufficient account of the substantial differences between anthroposophy and Gnosticism (even though, as Crone realizes, Steiner borrowed from the latter.) Although spiritual transcendence is central to both teachings, an-

Notes to Pages 176-185

217

t h r o p o s o p h y is not a dualistic system and has a very different concept of evil f r o m Gnosticism. 28. See, f o r example, Steiners An Outline of Occult Science, p. 105, or The Fifth Gospel, pp. 30, 41-42. 29. Additional evidence for Belyi's "reading" the Akashic record can be f o u n d in poems f r o m his collection Zvezda (1922). They suggest that he practiced meditation and had visions of a spiritual reality like the one Steiner described . See John M a l m s t a d s "The Poetry of A n d r e j Belyj : A Variorum Edition" (Ph. D . diss., Princeton University, 1968): poems N o . 345 "Samosoznanie" (1914), pp. 376-377; Nos. 346-50 "Karma" (1917), pp. 377-379; N o . 369 "Dukh" (1914), p. 393; N o . 371 "Vospominanie" (1914), p. 394; N o . 387 "Inspiratsiia" (1914), p. 402. 30. For another discussion of these metaphors, which, however, distorts the novel's metalinguistic dimension, see Carol Anschuetz, "Recollection as Metap h o r in Kotik Letaev," Russian Literature, 4 (October 1976), 345-355. 31. Zapiski chudaka, I, 154. See Bely s essay "Zhezl A a r o n a (O slove ν poezii)" f o r similar formulations and other illustrations of how Belyi matched gestures to w o r d s (especially pp. 186-189 passim), which recall the earlier essay "The Magic of Words." 32. For a description of the writing and publication history of the work see Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 27-28, p. 605. See also the Introduction by D. Tschizewskij and A . Hönig, which provides additional information, in the following reprint of the w o r k : Kreshchenyi kitaets (Moscow: Nikitinskie subbotniki, 1927; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969). All page references to this reprint of the w o r k will be given in the text. All translations f r o m the Russian are my own. 33. Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, pp. 19-20. 34. The best description of Belyi's hardships prior to his leaving f o r Berlin in 1921 is in his own (unsent) letter to his first wife Asia Turgeneva, dated 11 N o vember 1921, published in Vozdushnye puti, V (1967), 296-309. For a description of his tormented state in Berlin see M a r i n a Tsvetaeva's brilliant short memoir "Plennyi dukh (Moia vstrecha s A n d r e e m Belym)," reprinted in Proza (New York: Chekhov, 1953), pp. 286-352. 35. It is somewhat surprising that in Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (p. 331) Belyi would suggest that the "crime" in question was his going to a library instead of to school for a period during his early adolescence—another m a j o r incident in his life, and one he had planned to depict in The Crime of Nikolai Letaev. In The Baptized Chinaman there is ample evidence that Belyi conceived himself (albeit ironically) as a "criminal" during his early childhood because n o matter what he did, one parent would always be displeased (see p. 89). Perhaps the incident with the library f r o m a later time in his life should be u n d e r s t o o d as another, later manifestation of the original childhood t r a u m a . It is also possible that in his memoir Belyi w a s trying to deemphasize his self-identification with Christ in order not to antagonize the Soviet censorship. 36. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, ed. and abridged b y Francis J. Whitfield (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 461. For m o r e o n Belyi and the "Scythians," see ]. D. Elsworth, Audrey Bely (Letchworth, Herts., England:

218

Notes to Pages 1 8 5 - 1 9 3

Bradda, 1972), pp. 93, 95. 37. See Roger Keys s study "The Bely-Ivanov-Razumnik Correspondence," in Audrey Bely: A Critical Review, ed. by Gerald Janecek (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1978), pp. 193-204. 38. Samuel D. Cioran, The Apocalyptic Symbolism of Andrej Belyj (The Hague: Mouton, 1973) mingles Solov'ev's "Pan-Mongolism" and "Scythianism" and thus concludes that The Baptized Chinaman is an apocalyptic work (p. 36). 39. Steiner, Occult Science, p. 311. 40. A. Veksler, "'Epopeia' A. Belogo (Opyt komentariia)" in Sovremennaia literatura: Sbornik statei (Leningrad: Mysl', 1925), pp. 48-75. Conclusion 1. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1920), trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), p. 29. 2. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Slovo ν romane," in his Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975) pp. 180-181. 3. See Andrei Siniavskii's brilliant essay "What Socialist Realism Is" (Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm) in his Fantasticheskii mir Abrama Tertsa (New York: Inter-Library Associates, 1966), p. 423.

Index

Alighieri, Dante, 193 Anthroposophy: eurythmy, 22, 37, 122, 178-179, 196n9; parallels with Bely's theories, 51, 52, 90, 106-109, 112, 114, 192; Bely's experiences with, 73, 106107, 116, 154, 155, 161, 173, 209n22; cognition, 106, 113, 117, 119, 154, 156, 159, 162, 170, 172-174, 175-176, 186187; cosmogony, 106, 131, 133, 135136, 141, 151, 163, 174, 180, 182, 183, 193, 210n25; meditation, 106, 159, 163170, 171, 173-174; Bely's distortions of, 107, 117, 132, 152, 156, 159, 165-166, 167-168, 172, 187; conception of Christ, 142-144, 145, 169-173, 184, 187-189, 190; conception of evil, 145147, 188-189 Apocalypse: Solovievian eschatology, 1 0 11, 33, 42, 58, 60-61, 74, 79, 86, 98, 107, 125, 130-134, 137-139, 141-143, 155, 185, 205n9, 214n62; the Second Coming, 36, 37, 38, 73, 145, 147; and theme of East versus West, 80-83, 9 8 9 9 , 1 3 4 ; symbols of, 124-125, 140, 148152 A rebours (J.-Κ. Huysmans), 6 - 7 Avramenko, A. P., 24, 25 Azef, Evno, 144 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 193, 197n2 Balakian, Anna, 17 Baptized Chinaman, The, 1, 2, 37, 95,

126, 179, 182-190, 191 Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 7, 12, 25, 26 94, 192 Beginning of the Century, The, 18, 21 Bely, Andrei: and European and Russian literature, 1, 8, 59-60, 105, 191, 192, 197n7, 204n91, 212n44; biographical data, 1, 25, 37, 43, 72-73, 83-84, 95, 97, 112, 117, 121-122, 131, 132, 136, 144, 153-156, 158, 163-165, 169, 201n64, 212n42, 217n29, 217n35; relations with Soviet regime, 2 - 3 , 4, 21, 34-35, 153, 159, 171, 184, 196n8, 199n31, 202n71, 217n35; origins of early prose, 7 - 8 , 10-11, 22-26; problematic features of symbolist narratives, 12-13, 26, 31-32, 54-59, 62-66, 70-71, 93, 95-99, 111, 129-130, 157, 179-182, 198nl7; history of philosophy, 31-32; conception of multiplanar existence, 52-54, 96-98, 106, 114-115, 120, 157, 173, 174; literary plans, 95, 155, 169, 182-183, 205nl2 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 201n59, 2 0 6 n l 7 Between Two Revolutions, 57, 105, 132, 159 Bible, 10, 22, 23, 33, 49-50, 73, 114, 142, 169, 170, 187 Blavatskaia, Elena, 106 Blok, Aleksandr, 64, 72, 83, 86, 107, 121, 132, 136, 141, 185, 192

220

Index

Böcklin, Arnold, 14, 43, 53 Briusov, Valéry, 8, 9, 105

Haeckel, Ernst, 156-157, 166, 174, 189 Homer, 191, 192

Cerebral play, 89, 93, 109-122, 125, 129, 138, 158, 161, 172, 190, 192, 193, 211n34 Christ, 37, 51, 105, 106, 125, 129, 131, 141, 152, 156, 184, 185, 214n71. See also Anthroposophy; conception of Christ Chulkov, Georgy, 62, 89 Creative cognition. See Cerebral play and Self-thinking thoughts "Chrisis of Consciousness and Henrik Ibsen, The," 69 "Criticism and Symbolism," 12

Ibsen, Henrik, 8, 10, 44, 84 Irony: philosophical, 11, 44, 113, 168, 202n67; romantic, 12, 13, 128, 129-130 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 81, 83, 102

Determinism: dramatized in Bely s works, 29, 31, 36-38, 51, 62, 75-76, 84-92, 108, 117, 126, 132, 134, 139, 144-148, 152; implied in Bely's theory, 84, 105, 106 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 93, 101,115,129, 193, 212n44, 214n62 Elsworth, John, 88, 106, 196nl0 "Emblematics of Meaning, The," 69, 103, 104-105, 106, 107 Feidelson, Charles, Jr., 5 Fiction, ontological relation to reality: in Bely's works, 18-22, 35, 43-44, 92-95, 99, 109-111, 113-114, 121-122, 124, 176-177, 192-193; in Bely's theory, 18, 95, 103-105 First Encounter, The, 1, 35 First Symphony, The, 9-26, 29, 39, 54, 61, 65, 72, 92, 101, 154, 160, 174, 179, 190, 191 "Forms of Art, The," 12, 20, 34 Fourth Symphony, The, 54-67, 72, 96, 109, 174, 182 Freedman, Ralph, 59 Glossaloliia, 22, 122, 178, 188 Gnosticism, 46, 48, 62, 65, 171, 211n36, 216n27 Gofman, Viktor, 94 Gogol, Nikolai, 8, 95, 97-98, 101, 127, 205nll Gold in Azure, 25 Grossman, L. P., 26

Jakobson, Roman, 40, 42 Joyce, James, 1, 7 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 28, 44, 60, 100, 106, 137 Karlinsky, Simon, 96 Keys, Roger, 9 Kotik Letaev, 1, 3, 18, 37, 38, 54, 62, 95, 115, 126, 139, 143, 153-182, 183-187 passim, 189, 193 Kovac, Anton, 59, 60 Lavrov, Α. V., 24-25, 26, 44, 201n64 Les Lauriers sont coupés (E. Dujardin), 7, 8, 13, 65, 95 Lukács, Georg, 191 "Lyrical Fragments in Prose," 25-26 Madness, 202n71 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 11, 14, 44 "Magic of Words, The," 95, 103, 112, 128, 193 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 14, 17, 25, 26, 192 "Meaning of Art, The," 56, 64 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 8-9, 44, 83 Misperception, 33-37, 42, 74-76, 82, 8587 Morozova, Margarita, 35 Moscow and Masks, 1-2, 3, 196n9 Musical structures, 22-23, 24, 45-46, 5859, 202n68 Neo-Kantians, 60, 83, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18-19, 22-23, 31, 36, 37, 48-49, 51, 60, 81, 83, 84, 97, 107, 130, 191, 202n71, 209nl9 Notes of an Eccentric, 72, 95, 99,126,154, 161, 164, 179, 195n4 Occult science, See Anthroposophy On the Border of Two Centuries, 25, 153, 183, 217n35 "On the Meaning of Cognition," 159, 160, 163, 164, 166, 169, 170, 173, 174, 176

Index

Passivity versus willfulness, 35-37, 39, 74, 76, 85, 104, 206nl7 Personification, 16, 70 Petersburg, 1, 3, 6, 11, 12, 18, 20, 21, 24, 38, 43, 44, 52, 54, 62, 68, 78, 89, 91, 92, 94-95, 98, 99, 100-152, 153-162 passim, 165, 167, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 185, 186, 189, 190, 192-193, 207nl Plato, 12, 17, 21, 58, 98, 111, 162, 168 Poe, Edgar Allan, 26 Prose poetry, 6, 25-26 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 101, 130, 147, 148 "Sacred colors," 11, 51, 72 Satire, 11, 44, 102, 167, 202n67 Schmidt, Anna, 34, 35 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 7, 20-21, 22, 24, 27-29, 31, 32, 41, 45, 60, 83, 180 Scythianism, 185 Second Symphony, The, 1, 2, 13, 18, 2 6 46, 47, 52, 56, 58, 61, 72, 74, 78-79, 84, 87, 90, 96, 98, 102, 104, 109, 113, 138, 145, 147, 160, 172, 174, 180, 2 0 5 n l 3 Self-thinking thoughts, 88-90, 92, 116118, 172, 211n40 Shklovsky, Viktor, 155, 195nl Silver Dove, The, 1, 3, 11, 12, 16, 36, 37, 44, 54, 58, 62, 68-99, 101, 102, 104, 112, 116, 121, 134, 139, 145, 147, 148, 153, 154, 167, 174, 177 Siniavsky, Andrei, 193 Sologub, Fedor, 9, 68 Soloviev, Mikhail, 8, 25, 32, 34, 200n45 Soloviev, Olga, 8, 14, 25 Soloviev, Sergei, 32, 43, 81 Soloviev, Vladimir: teachings and influence, 8, 18, 29, 30, 32, 64, 76, 8 2 83, 93, 106, 111, 146, 180, 200n57; appearances in Bely's fiction, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 172. See also Apocalypse Steiner, Rudolf. See Anthroposophy Style and narrative structure, 5, 26-27, 29, 38-43, 46-47, 92, 95-99, 100, 101, 111, 122, 123, 138, 150, 155, 156, 157,

221

160, 162, 163, 179, 180, 183, 186, 187, 188, 208n72 Symbolic cognition, 36-37, 38, 78, 88-90, 96-97, 103-106, 108, 109-122, 133, 156-157, 162-163, 158-170, 172-174, 176, 178-179, 189-190, 193 Symbolic language, 14-17, 62-67, 69-73, 77-78, 92-95, 103-104, 126-130, 155, 166-167, 176-179, 180-182, 190, 193 "Symbolism as a World View," 18, 23, 31, 48, 50 Symbolism: Bely's theory of, 3 - 4 , 12-13, 20-21, 23, 38, 56, 64, 69, 84, 92-93, 9 4 95, 102-109, 155, 192, 1 9 6 n l l , 208n4, 209nl3; in Bely's works, 27-30, 38-43, 45, 55-59, 62-67, 69-72, 75, 88-90, 138, 148-152, 158, 162, 172, 186 Symbolist narrative, problem of, 5 - 9 , 24, 193. See also Bely, Andrei Theurgy, 18, 35, 36, 69, 73, 74, 76, 79 Third Symphony, The, 42, 46-54, 58, 61, 72, 148, 174 Time, 49-52, 61-62, 87-88, 125, 147-148, 190 Tiutchev, Fedor, 8, 64, 80 Tolstoy, Leo, 64, 96, 101, 115, 153, 165, 193, 200n57 Trotsky, Leon, 2 Turgenev, Ivan (Senilia, Poems in Prose), 25, 26 Typographical devices, 7, 22-24, 41, 4 6 47, 48, 123-126, 150, 158, 188, 213n52 Uitti, Karl, 7 Veksler, Α., 188-189 Verlaine, Paul, 17, 94 Wagner, Richard, 8, 22-23, 24, 57, 150 Why I Became a Symbolist, 107, 154 Writing, revaluation of, 1 2 , 1 3 , 21-22, 9 3 94, 111, 125, 126, 129-130 Zola, Émile, 7, 94

Russian Research Center Studies 1. Public Opinion in Soviet Russia: A Study in Mass Persuasion, by Alex Inkeles. 2. Soviet Politics—The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change, by Barrington Moore, Jr. 3. Justice in the U.S.S.R.: An Interpretation of Soviet Law, by Harold J. Berman. 4. Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, by Benjamin I. Schwartz. 5. Titoism and the Cominform, by Adam B. Ulam. 6. A Documentary History of Chinese Communism, by Conrad Brandt, Benjamin Schwartz, and John K. Fairbank. 7. The New Man in Soviet Psychology, by Raymond A. Bauer. 8. Soviet Opposition to Stalin: A Case Study in Wold War II, by George Fischer. 9. Minerals: A Key to Soviet Power, by Demitri Β. Shimkin. 10. Soviet Law in Action: The Recollected Cases of a Soviet Lawyer, by Boris A. Konstantinovsky; edited by Harold J. Berman. 11. How Russia Is Ruled, by Merle Fainsod. Revised edition. 12. Terror and Progress—USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship, by Barrington Moore, Jr. 13. The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923, by Richard Pipes. Revised edition. 14. Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice—A Critical Essay, by Alfred G. Meyer. Reissued with a new introduction. 15. Soviet Industrial Production, 1928-1951, by Donald R. Hodgman. 16. Soviet Taxation: The Fiscal and Monetary Problems of a Planned Economy, by Franklyn D. Holzman. 17. Soviet Military Law and Administration, by Harold J. Berman and Miroslav Kerner. 18. Documents on Soviet Military Law and Administration, edited and translated by Harold J. Berman and Miroslav Kerner. 19. The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism, by Leopold H. Haimson. 20. The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism, by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. 21. Belorussia: The Making of a Nation—A Case Study, by Nicholas R Vakar. 22. A Bibliographical Guide to Belorussia, by Nicholas P. Vakar. 23. The Balkans in Our Times, by Robert Lee Wolff (also American Foreign Policy Library). Revised edition. 24. How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological, and Social Themes, by Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn. 25. The Economics of Soviet Steel, by M. Gardner Clark. 26. Leninism, by Alfred G. Meyer. 27. Factory and Manager in the USSR, by Joseph S. Berliner. 28. Soviet Transportation Policy, by Holland Hunter. 29. Doctor and Patient in Soviet Russia, by Mark G. Field. 30. Russian Liberalism: From Gentry to Intelligentsia, by George Fischer.

31. Stalin's Failure in China, 1924-1927, by Conrad Brandt. 32. The Communist Party of Poland: An Outline of History, by M. K. Dziewanowski. Second edition. 33. Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis, by Richard Pipes. 34. A Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, by N. M. Karamzin, the Russian text edited by Richard Pipes. 35. The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society, by Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer. 36. Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia, by Serge A. Zenkovsky. 37. The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, by Zbigniew Brzezinski. (Sponsored jointly with the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.) Revised and enlarged edition. Also in Harvard Paperbacks. 38. National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia, by Hans Rogger. 39. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855, by Martin Malia. 40. The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, by Robert Vincent Daniels. 41. The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928, by Alexander Erlich. 42. The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I, by Sidney Monas. 43. Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism, by Arthur P. Mendel. 44. Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959, by Harold Swayze. 45. Accounting in Soviet Planning and Management, by Robert W. Campbell. 46. Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897, by Richard Pipes. 47. The New Face of Soviet Totalitarianism, by Adam B. Ulam. 48. Stalin's Foreign Policy Reappraised, by Marshall D. Shulman. 49. The Soviet Youth Program: Regimentation and Rebellion, by Allen Kassof. 50. Soviet Criminal Law and Procedure: The RSFSR Codes, translated by Harold J. Berman and James W. Spindler; introduction and analysis by Harold J. Berman. Second edition. 51. Poland's Politics: Idealism vs. Realism, by Adam Bromke. 52. Managerial Power and Soviet Politics, by Jeremy R. Azrael. 53. Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher, by Robert E. MacMaster. 54. Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924, by Seymour Becker. 55. Revolutionary Russia, edited by Richard Pipes. 56. The Family in Soviet Russia, by H. Kent Geiger. 57. Social Change in Soviet Russia, by Alex Inkeles. 58. The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial DecisionMaking, by Jerry F. Hough. 59. Soviet-Polish Relations, 1917-1921, by Piotr S. Wandycz.

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.)