By Aleksey Calvin

“…all we see – /is mere reflection, a mere shadow/of the things our eyes are blind to.” – Vladimir Solovyev
“Large, widely-spaced eyes, raging flames upon a pale, exhausted face. An incredibly high forehead with a small island of hairs standing on end/…/at times Bely seems like an incredible clown. But when he’s near, - anxiety and longing, a sensation of some elemental distress overtakes everyone.” - Ilya Erenburg

Andrey Bely belongs to the list of the greatest poets and novelists of the “Silver Age”, but besides that honorable category his uniqueness as a writer and person effectively bars him from categorization. In Western literary history Bely is largely known as the author of Petersburg, one of the few modernist-era novels to rival Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway in stylistic innovation and psychological complexity. In Russia, however, he is better remembered as a prime practitioner and theoretician of a brand of poetry falling under the label of “Symbolism” or “Russian Symbolism”, to differentiate it from its French-led counterpart of a movement, one which achieved fruition before most of the Russian Symbolists were even born. Despite their matching titles, these two currents symbol-rich poetry (of which the French was sourced from Baudelaire and perfected by Mallarmé ) are not necessarily synonymous. Russian Symbolism was as much a unique product of its country and time period as it was an extension of the French school of verse, in much the same way that Pushkin was as distinct from Byron and Keats as they were from Goethe. Firstly, the work of the Russian Symbolists, with Bely as one of their main innovators, earnestly and deeply responded to what appeared as a spiritual crisis in Europe, a crisis brought on by advanced modernity. Though the conditions of Russia in early 1910's, where the joint evolution of an industrial capitalist society and of bourgeois mass culture was still in its early stages, may have somewhat resembled those of Baudelaire's France of half-a-century before, the idiosyncrasies of Russian religious, intellectual, and especially of rural day-to-day life created an entirely different background for “symbolic poetry” to develop against. Further on, being informed by the atmosphere of rapid change pervading Europe at the time as well as by expectations of even greater changes around the corner (which in Russia was quite well-founded), the Russian Symbolist aesthetics were generally much more open and daring when it came to formal experimentation than even the more recent extremes of the French school (first personified by Rimbaud who was, incientally, a massive hit with the Russians and was perpetually re-translated by everyone and their countess girlfriend). Like Yeats, many of Russia's poets transgressed or entirely erased borders between Symbolism and Modernism and even pioneered many techniques which soon became utilized by the country's Futurists many of whom, in spite of their “down with the past” rhetoric, were not ashamed to cite Andrey Bely as an inspiration

Bely was born in the year 1880 to the pale, uncertain, light of a late October Moscow. His now-famous name was not the one which the versifier was given at birth but, in fact, a pen moniker which can be literally translated as “Andrew the White”, perhaps evoking the poet’s lifelong pursuit of spiritual perfection and bright eternity as motifs. Instead, the name under which he first stepped into Moscow's society was Boris Nikolayevich Bugaev. His father Nikolay Bugaev was a renowned mathematician and a professor at the Moscow University, an incredibly cultured man who, in the course of his lifetime, managed to spin a complex web of connections across the artistic and academic circles of the golden-domed metropolis. It is said that Lev Tolstoy himself visited the family at their residence. Boris was a child with a mind at once perpetually entwined in dreams and at decisive moments capable of scimitar-sharp intelligence. Being an attractive, big-eyed boy, Boris is said to have resemble some little fairy tale prince with a great future full of magical possibilities spread out before him. He certainly had no trouble utterly charming the frequent visitors to his parents’ abode, a lively and intriguing place stuffed with books and works of art. From the ages of eleven to eighteen Boris attended the famed boy’s private gymnasium of Lev Polipanov which resided in the heart of the city, on the second story of an urban mansion which featured a façade fashioned with enormous Neo-classical columns. Though already a lodger of numerous cloud-castles, the future poet managed to remain a decent student and displayed a great aptitude for both the languages/arts and the sciences/mathematics. This is the point when his interest in literature began to include many of the influential and groundbreaking semi-contemporary and classic littérateurs and thinkers such as Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Nietzsche. According to his autobiography, he began to write at the age of fifteen. According to the same autobiography, one of his earliest attempts at writing fiction (which, unfortunately, became lost in the whirlpools of time) had to do with an American practitioner of yoga with an ability to murder people with his gaze. One of his first poems was a short four-line lyric:

“Right by the half-rotten cross
Who’s that howling oh so wildly?
Could it be -- a pack of wolves?
No: it is my shadow crying!”

These were also the years when Bely first became interested in spirituality, a more experiential extension of his lifelong fascination with mythology. Almost from the offset, he discovered various manifestations of mysticism and religion, such as certain strands of Buddhism, all of which may have seemed quite exotic in Russia at that time, but potentially transformative to a young open mind. Perhaps, when the still childlike dreamer put his ear to one of the numerous imported books he read he may have heard echoes of some magic ancient world he imagined, echoes intermingled with ringing calls of an even more wondrous future. And perhaps our hero, with the sort of mental disposition he possessed, was lucky to have been born into such a wide-eyed time, into a city full of novelties, both tangible and mystical. While little Boris grew taller and wiser, aspects of the latter were starting to manifest themselves as countless artistic and spiritual/occult movements popping up all around Europe at that time. Those were strange days indeed. And could anyone have really known then that this boy would someday play an invaluable part in this very story's spinning? That he will be remembered by posterity as a kingly poet, word-alchemist, and as one who dared to stare at the sun (or merely at stars)?

One thing is sure: We can safely guess that if his father had any inkling at all of the boy’s eventual fate, it was far from a certainty. After all, even if young Boris already began writing verse then, it was still distant from the poetic heights he would achieve a mere few years later. Thus, the older Bugaev influenced the boy to enter the very University where he taught, though not to study literature or mythology, but rather into the natural sciences wing of the school’s physics-mathematics department, which virtually served as Nikolay Bugaev’s home away from home. Unlike many other young poets who were steered into similar compromises by the wind from their parents’ wings, Boris actually graduated. What's more, for the rest of his life he would claim that this foray into organized study of the precise sciences was, in many ways, incredibly useful to his development. The impressive scope of Bely’s erudition and the sheer kaleidoscopic variety of deeply explored themes which course through his prolific work have always set the poet apart from his contemporary versifiers and novelists. Besides this multi-faceted largesse of mind, another consistent aspect of Bely’s oeuvre is the author's assumption that the ultimate purpose of poetic creation is the transmutation of a society’s spiritual existence and other potentialities. One recalls Aleister’s Crowley’s famous dictum that the nature of magical practice is “the method of science, the aim of religion”. In a similar way, the nature of Bely’s creativity is “the methods of modern art, the aim of spirituaity”. Next to this fundamental fascination with religion and mysticism, which would stretch through the length of his poetic career, another aspect of Boris’s gymnasium/university years which would serve as foundational for his creativity is his relationship to the social world around him and especially his friendships of the time, the most important of which was certainly the one with Sergey Solovyev. Solovyev, who would become a great Symbolist poet in his own right, was the nephew of the great Russian philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovyev (whose biography and short opus “Panmongolism” can be found elsewhere in this anthology). Sergey immediately introduced the perpetually curious Boris to the teachings of his uncle, which seemed to further ignite Bugaev's genius, giving it a transcendent sense of purpose. Indeed, the older Solovyev’s influence was paramount in establishing the precise philosophical/spiritual grounding of the Symbolists in general. Solovyev believed that through meditation on the concept of the “Eternal Feminine” (an archetypal Goddess-like figure which encompasses natural manifestations but also aspects of the Gnostic ideal of wisdom anthropomorphized as “Sophia”) as well as a sense of spiritual love (or the Greek agape) humanity may be able to transcend their mortal imperfection and rise up into a higher quasi-angelic state. Solovyev’s doctrines were concurrently inspired by the idiosyncratic Russian brand of Christianity (the “Eternal Feminine” echoes many female Orthodox saints) and by the Nietzschean ideals of alchemy-like transmutation or the overcoming of humanity. According to Solovyev, it is the mystics, visionaries, and poets who could help humanity shed the shackles of corrupt materialistic modernity with it trivialities and its atmosphere of alienation and meanness and proceed to build up a City of God in its place. The ideas professed by Solovyev were essentially apocalyptic in that they reflect the fin de siècle foreboding that history was about to conclude in some cataclysmic and/or cathartic manner, but also lent themselves very well to literary applications by, firstly, proclaiming the primacy of the artist and of the necessity of conscious creation to the actual materialization of this process in the world. The empowerment and the sense of purpose provided by this early philosophical foundation fueled Bely’s artistic inspiration for many years to come.

Sergey Solovyev also happened to be related to Alexander Blok and has been close friends with the gray-eyed verse-master since childhood. So, it was just a matter of time until Boris met Blok through Sergey. And what musketeers they became! The trio of young poets became inseparable, sharing with each other books, poems, dreams, and wild drunken adventures. Theirs was, in the words of late Slavicist Renato Poggioli, a sort of a “mystical brotherhood”. Solovyev and Blok soon became involved in the first literary society organized by Bely/Bugaev. Besides them, it largely involved a number of Boris’s classmates at the school of sciences. Drawing from his fascination with Greek mythology, Bugaev dubbed the society “The Argonauts”, in honor of literature’s first “supergroup”. This was also the time when Boris Bugaev, the student of sciences, was finally metamorphosed into Andrey Bely, the legendary poetic maverick. The name was given to him by Mikhail Solovyev, the father of Sergei and brother of Vladimir, who was a philosopher and a penman in his own right. In 1901 the newly renamed Andrey Bely met some of the older guard of the Russian Symbolist poets and prose-weavers. The movement was then first becoming le chic around town, equally enchanting young versifiers and older masters with its mystic sensibilities, promise of synaesthesia, and the alluring model of Baudelaire’s “forets de symbols/Qui l’(homme) observant avec des regards familiers.”

Bely’s matching ideals of spirituality and mysticism were the fuel energizing much of his earliest work's meaning. However, for better or worse, “meaning” was not its most original or ingenious component. Unlike the majority of even the most creative poets and prose writers of the era like Joyce, Khlebnikov, Pound, Mallarme, Proust, and Apollinaire, Bely did not slowly evolve from more-or-less aesthetically conventional beginnings towards a maturity of fearless formal novelty and unprecedented projects. Instead, that's where he began. His very first complete works, the “Symphonies”, are not only, thanks to their intellectual conception and form, unlike anything which either preceded or followed them in literature but are unquestionably effective in the simple sense of being a good, involving read. Bely, who viewed music as the reigning form of art through its ability to directly evoke and embody spiritual perfection rather than merely echoing it, chose to initiate his literary career by attempting to create a true synthesis of music and poetry, an ideal which has only been talked about or half-seriously approximated by past masters. The basis of Bely’s approach to fashioning his series of four lengthy “Symphonies” is to treat images as musical phrases which come together inside semantically connected text portions (or stanzas, if you will) which perform a function similar to measures within a piece of music. Each of the poetic phrases/images/lines is numbered, but this does not distract one from the text’s continuity. This construction may have seemed like a mere gimmick in an attempt to “rebrand” what otherwise may be seen as mere prose poems of epic length, but Bely avoids this pitfall by managing to utilize the unique potential of the form he created. The first thing that strikes one about these works is that they are actually musical, particularly in the rhythmic sense, though the rhythms here are largely organized semantically (however difficult this may be to explain). Images are often repeated verbatim or with slight variations and one notices associative correspondences “singing” to each other across the “measures”. But, above everything, what really makes the Symphonies work is the remarkable directness and vividness of the images, as if Bely drew inspiration from the same Japanese sources which in a few years would inform Pound’s early verse. The first of the Symphonies was 1902’s Dramatic Symphony which explores the many crisscrossed worlds, paths, faces, and masks of Moscow at the turn of the century. Its words dance across rich mansions, grimy apartment stairwells, and crowded avenues where a mean-spirited literary critic and a Dostoyevskian priest may walk beside a philosopher maddened by existence’s throbbing minutiae, where a dame trapped in a loveless marriage may concurrently serve as a manifestation of Sophia and as a tragic femme fatale. Its hero is a mystic with an ability to heed the voice of Eternity itself. In a review of his friend’s first major work Blok expressed an artistic kinship with the Symphony’s themes, proclaiming “I have dreamed this dream.” 

1902 saw the publication not only of this work, Bely’s first of much consequence, but also of some of his earliest critical articles where he elucidated the approach of his “symphonies” to an undoubtedly somewhat bewildered literary community. In his article “The Forms of Art” published in the magazine The World of Art (and which later became included in the poet’s 1910 book “Symbolism”) expounds Bely’s views on the relationships between art-forms and the potentialities of active relationships between them. In his theory of arts Bely adopted Nietzsche’s view that music, due to its no-representational and, in a way, primordial nature of being flowing, energy-like (since any collection of sounds could be framed or altered into music), was essentially a Dionysian art form, whilst literature and the visual arts were reliant upon forms, on the duality between existence’s basic energy and its idea-borne manifestations and were, in contrast, Apollonian. An unlike those beaming arts as bright as the strings of the sun god's lyre, music (in its manifestation rather than mathematical theory) is largely concerned with non-representational patterns which evoke moods and become implicitly connected to the internal states of the listeners' emotional beings.

The second symphony, 1903’s The Northern (Heroic) Symphony (the beginning of which is included below), is inspired by Bely’s interest in folklore, medieval lore, as well as the occult and at first glance may seem like a poetic fairy tale of sorts. Upon a closer inspection (or a second reading), however, it reveals itself for what it truly is: a forest of symbols, a sea of resonances. Like the Dramatic Symphony, Bely’s second masterpiece utilizes such distinctly musical techniques as counterpoint, refrains, and impressionistic progression of narratives. Two more “Symphonies” followed: The Return (The Third Symphony) (1905) and The Goblet of Blizzards (The Fourth Symphony) (1908). Each grew more complex in its themes and formal techniques. The Return explores the notion of insanity and chaos as pathways to “knowing” the spiritual nature of the cosmos or else touching it, speaking unto God and hearing her voice respond. In order to do so the “Symphony’s” hero breaks through a chain of resurrections or eternal returns (another Nietzschean idea). The Goblet of Blizzards features numerous archetypal and mythological images such as the vision of a “universal Wife” and the allegory of a battle with a dragon. Here this battle takes place on the eve of an apocalypse. Later in the 20th century the importance of these motifs to religion and the arts would become explored by academic thinkers like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. It is remarkable that even as a very young man Bely was already aware of what one may call literature’s ancient soul, its set of animating principles. Could he perhaps have read anthropologist James Frazer’s influential 1890 study The Golden Bough which was, at that time, one of the most complex and illuminating explorations of the topic?

Even though immediately at release “The Symphonies” caused a veritable cultural scandal (like many others of Bely’s works) and, quite shockingly, many critics and readers of the time considered them a failure (mainly due to being confused and overwhelmed by their unprecedented form), besides being wondrously unique pieces of Symbolist/Modernist literature these works also filled a valuable function as a training ground for Bely’s personal evolution from a prodigious young poet to the many-sided scribe who would some years later pen Petersburg, one of the greatest examples of the novel form and one of Ulysses’s few competitors for the status of the 20th century’s most masterfully crafted work of prose fiction. Certainly, the musical sense which pervades that novel's prose style as well as many of its themes have had their origins in Bely’s earliest creative opuses (especially Symphony #1).

At the same time as working on his “Symphonies” Bely was also composing the poems which became collected in 1904 under the title Gold within the Azure. These 54 poems are much more aesthetically singular than the “Symphonies”: bright and lively, mystical and mythic, pulsating with rainbows and dripping subtle melancholy. These lyrics reveal much less sadness, much fewer twilight tones than Bely’s subsequent works. The collection is largely concerned with a search for a pure distillation of beauty (like the Argonauts’ quest for the golden fleece): the beauty of vibrant springtime rebirth, of bright flowers. The characters who populate its pages (many of them magician-poets) reach for illumination which is at once ethereal and of the Earth. Perhaps many of these illuminations are illusions, startling and magnificent specters of poesy, but even so, they may fill one with a sense of joy, of splendor. It may be a difficult quest to find poems more beautiful in a basic, flowing, evocative way, and yet also splashing around with bright extensions of meaning. “My words – a waterspray of pearls…” the poet writes in one of the collection’s concluding pieces.

With his second collection Ashes (1909) the poet displays a certain shift in his attitude to one of more open-eyed sorrow, of a certain awareness triggered by the failed revolution of 1905 which may have revealed to him Russia as it truly was at the time: a land where madness could just as easily be murderous as visionary, where millions of people existed in a state closer to death by starvation than to spiritual enlightenment, where a soul of barbarism still lurked in the woody wilds. In this collection Bely for the first time minimized his fixation with the universal and the mythical and instead focused on painting a portrait of his country, though still using his jexpanding arsenal of Symbolist techniques. Scholar Renato Poggioli writes in his book Poets of Russia that “Here the poet’s master and model is no longer Solovyev, but Nekrasov… Bely’s peasantry and countryside represent Russia herself, personified as a monstrous feminine figure, miserable and wicked, with “yellow eyes” made by the lamps of her “crazy taverns”. Instead of hymns, the poet now utters curses and plaints…” And yet one still senses an overwhelming love for this cruel mistress in Bely’s verse. He sees in the potentialities of a revolution a reflection of the same vision of a cleansing apocalypse which he had adopted from Solovyev. But the ultimate meaning of the changes which Bely undergoes between Gold within the Azure and Ashes is that the poet became ready to fill a historical function of elucidating his world and his era both for his contemporaries and for the posterity. The poems seem to ask: “What is the meaning, the real soul of Russia? And how could it be saved from its plagues?” For Bely, attempts to answer these questions would still largely lead towards spirituality and mysticism, but the journey he takes in the process would finally take him across his country with a set of clear eyes and an ever-more brilliant pen in his hand. During the following decade Blok would make a similar journey which would lead him towards writing his greatest work The Twelve, but unlike his youth's dear friend Bely would never waver in his hopes, become broken in his spirit. Contrary to Blok he would never place his bets in one place, whether it be the Revolution, the teachings of Solovyev, Buddha, Rudolph Steiner, or Kant whose philosophy, particularly its social aspects, intrigued Bely since 1905. Thanks to this flexibility, for all the chains of major, bitter woes in which Bely's life would get entangled, he would never face that overwhelming type of disappointment which ended up spiritually and then physically killing Blok.

The intensity of Ashes is somewhat tempered by the collection which came out only a year after it and was titled Urn. Its very title indicates the collection’s intention to consolidate and contain the disparate anxieties borne of burnt up young hopes: that “rite of passage” process which defines Ashes. Urn once again returns to the concerns of spirit, but of a spirit transmuted by time and by age. In a sense the verse collected here is more lyrical than Ashes, but it’s also sardonic, full of autumnal and twilight tones. But though it may be even darker than Ashes, it feels much more peaceful, resigned into a true awareness. This collection speaks of a realism which has nothing to do with materialism, it speaks of maturity, and it does so in some of the most beautiful language of Bely’s career.

Some of the new darkness flowing through these collections, as well as the new appreciation of Russia – perhaps formed, in part, of nostalgia – may be attributed to the turmoil the poet began to experience in his personal life during those years. In 1908-1909 when Bely was in the middle of completing the Ashes/Urn poetic series and also working on his first novella, he finally faced the resolution of his long-lasting and insanely dramatic infatuation/relationship with Alexander Blok’s wife (and one of the great “muses” of Russian poetry) Lyubov Mendeleeva (the daughter of Dmitri Mendeleev: Yes, the one and only scientific genius who purportedly invented the “table of the elements” in his dreams). A few years before, in the earlier stages of his friendship with Blok, when the two young men (as well as Sergey Solovyev) were inseparable, Blok’s pretty, intelligent, assertive, and well-read bride quickly integrated herself into their circle. For Bely, Lyubov (whose name literally translates as “love”) began to seem like an earthly embodiment of Sophia or Solovyev’s “Eternal Feminine”. A version of her performs this divine function in the pages of Urn. In this faire lady young Andrey saw an ideal of beauty and perfection: a goddess, a nymph, and an angel. Their relationship may or may not have been consummated in a physical sense (though the two did secretly meet in an apartment on Shpalernaya Street), but bodily passions were not the main focus of the poet’s incredibly romantic heart. What we know is that Bely gradually became completely consumed by his obsession with this woman, the wife of one of his best friends. For a while a love triangle of sorts was formed due to Lyubov’s confusion. She seemed to have been unable to make up her mind about which poet she was more in love with. Elements of this love triangle were infused by Bely into his masterpiece Petersburg.

Eventually, Mendeleeva made her choice and she chose her husband. She promptly informed Bely that they must never again see each other. For Bely, who held strong beliefs in the primacy of destiny and reality of love, this refusal was equivalent to a deathly tragedy. He felt betrayed and abandoned, feeling it quite necessary in this shattered state to leave the country and begin one of his self-imposed exiles to Western Europe. The Mendleeva debacle also ended up permanently staining the relations between Bely and Blok. Though the two continued to admire each other’s work, they would never again become close friends. In fact, the two great poets (both of whom were surprisingly hot-headed in certain circumstances) challenged each other to duels several times. Luckily, none of them led to serious injuries. One would think that in the century since the premature deaths of Pushkin and Lermontov, both resulting from duels, Russian poets may have learned to keep things more civil, if not for their own sakes then for the sake of posterity. But artists are a special breed… Meanwhile Sergey Solovyev remained friends with the two hapless “duelantes” and sometimes served in the role of an “arbiter” between them.

Bely’s first stay in Europe lasted only half a year. He could not yet grow used to being separated from his homeland and, after a few months, the tragic afterglow of the failed romance with Lyubov gradually faded. He returned to Russia and focused on his writing with a renewed vigor. Around this time the poet began working on several books of criticism where he attempted to explain the basis of his artistic perceptions and tastes as well as his creative philosophy. The book Symbolism (1910), in particular, remains one of the best explications of the frequently misunderstood and marginalized poetic movement by one of its most dynamic personages.

Soon after Bely’s return home he made the acquaintance of a young woman who would be destined to bring him immense hope and joy intermingled with great suffering and anxiety. Her name was Anna Turgeneva (or “Asya” for short), an artist and a relative of the great late novelist Ivan Turgenev (who was a friend of Bely’s father). The incredibly witty and vibrant woman with a rich, outgoing, somewhat teasing character enchanted Bely just as Shakespeare was once enchanted by his dark lady. Bely’s relationship with her was possibly his first fully reciprocal multi-faceted partnership with a woman, one which combined in itself intellectual rapport, physical intimacy, emotional connectivity and eventually a form of codependency. The couple almost immediately absconded back to Europe where Asya, a proud modern woman, felt more at ease. In the near future, the two would expand the range of their travels and continue on down to Africa and even out to Asia. Beginning with around 1910, as Bely romps around the globe, prose begins to take center stage in his creativity and will remain in this important position for a number of years. In 1912 comes another meeting which proves decisive to Bely’s fate. This was the year when the writer and his girlfriend meet the famous Austrian esoteric philosopher, writer, literary critic, and social reformer Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the spiritual doctrine known as anthroposophy, which had connections to German idealism, individualism, Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy, as well as certain occult and masonic orders and lodges. Steiner claimed the existence of an objectively perceivable spiritual realm or realms. He believed that they could be a source of transcendent information or wisdom. In a sense, Steiner’s cosmology has a lot in common with Neo-Platonism or even with Christian Gnosticism. Certainly, it’s easy to see why someone like Bely, who already believed in the existence of archetypal spiritual essences entwined with wisdom and creativity and of the necessity of revealing the world’s “true face”, would become attracted to such a worldview. Unlike many other spiritual leaders, Steiner firmly accepted the verity and necessity of the scientific method and its elucidation of the natural world’s causalities. He believed it absolutely necessary for humanity to reconcile science and spirituality: the logical and the intuitive, the intellectual and the emotional… He also put forth a theory of evolution which has a lot more in common with Henri Bergson’s “creative evolution” than with the post-Victorian capitalism-informed “survival of the strongest” view of nature. According to Steiner, one of the basic long-term goals of humanity is to precipitate its own evolution towards a more aware, ethical, intelligent, healthy, and creative state. To this purpose, the philosopher continually emphasized the value of reinventing education into a system meant to decipher and stimulate each person’s individuated potential. These educational ideals were developed by Steiner into what became as the Waldorf Schools which exist to this day (there are almost 4000 schools and kindergartens located in 60 countries).

When Bely and Asya learned about Steiner they became incredibly enthused about his thinking and began to make frequent appearances at his lectures. Very soon, they met Steiner himself and impressed him enough to become two of his favorite and most trusted disciples. During this time Bely practically stopped communicating with his former writerly circles and leaped head-first into spiritual practice. He also, for the first time, dedicated himself almost solely to writing prose. At the beginning of 1914, as war was breaking out in Europe, Bely was already one of Steiner’s closest companions and one of the people involved in the construction of a major anthroposophist temple called Goetheanum in the Swiss city of Dornach. Named after Johann Von Goethe, the enormous building (the main hall can hold up to 1500 people), immediately became the worldwide center of anthroposophy upon its completion in 1919. Tragically, it caught (or was set) on fire on the New Year’s Eve 1922-1923, but was rebuilt and made even grander within a few years. In 1914 Bely finally married Asya in the company of their anthroposophist friends and colleagues. However, within a couple of years they were already becoming somewhat alienated from each other. The main factors which played into that was Bely’s uncompromising individuality, his essentially relativistic attitudes inspired by the diversity of his education and expertise, but also his romanticist need for a full loving commitment from his wife. The former qualities began to occasionally put Bely at odds with Steiner. Whenever the author disagreed with the philosopher, he was too honest and proud to hide it or compromise, but preferred to state his opinion clearly. Besides, Bely’s brilliance and erudition, which were comparable to Steiner’s if not superior, also meant that he was more of an equal to the philosopher than a gullible disciple like many of the other personages around them. Unfortunately, what Steiner sought in his companions (even within his “inner circle”) was not a group of his equals but, rather, a loyal collection of followers. Ultimately, Bely just could not accept Steiner's bewildering Freud-like (or Nietzsche-like) tendency to act like he was always right, perpetually “in the know”, a wielder of a deeper, more enlightened sensibility than even his most “promising” companions. His open-mindedness (a necessary quality for a great author) opened Bely up to a wide range of beliefs and perspectives. This created a slowly widening schism between Steiner and Bely. Asya, who grew accustomed to being a disciple and a follower (first of her husband and then Steiner), could not accept Bely's gradual alienation from the community which she now viewed as her home. Then came the day when Bely finally broke with Steiner. Though Asya continued to live with him for a little while longer, she considered it a break with her as well. In fact, she was so attached to anthroposophy, which seemed to infuse her life with purpose and direction, that sacrificing her famous husband (who was mostly away, in his work and meditations, anyways, might not have seemed like an act of ending her world, but rather of continuing it. One day she simply eft and never came back. Bely took the departure of Asya hard, but not nearly as hard as the betrayal of Lyubov years earlier. After all, as Hemingway once said, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

As already mentioned, Bely continued to write prolifically during his life abroad. Sometime around 1907 Bely conceives a trilogy of novels entitled East or West. He saw it as a grand epic which would explore the historical destiny of Russia, a country which combines within its nature both eastern and western cultural roots. Within interplay of these energies is hidden the genetic trace of both Russia’s unique role in the world and its perpetual propensity for tragedy. Silver Dove (1909), Bely’s first major work of prose (besides some short stories and a book of criticism) is the beginning of the planned trilogy and is meant to epitomize the country’s Eastern beginnings. The book brims with the kind of chaos one imagines reigning at old-time gatherings of backwoods mead-drinkers, oozes through air with onomatopoeic echoes of strange religious gatherings, glows like a golden sun drowning vast fields of grain; at last, the reader beholds its mystery, born of the same frozen Siberian villages that once created Rasputin. On the other hand, the logical Western mind is at the background of 1913’s Petersburg, which Bely intended as the second part of the cycle. L. K. Dolgopolov writes in his 1982 book on the creation of the novel that “Russia became, according to Bely, a country within which came together the primary tendencies of the world historical process but, having come together, they did not “make peace with each other” and, as far as he is concerned, “they are not destined to make peace...” The concluding part of the trilogy (which was supposed to contain the key to a solution of this conflict) was never written. But one could make a case that Petersburg already broke free of the trilogy’s intended patterning. It certainly has very few, if any, correspondences and connections to Silver Dove. Even formally and stylistically Silver Dove seems to largely imitate the classic prose of the 19th century Russian masters and especially of Gogol. The groundbreaking innovative techniques which Bely first developed in “The Symphonies” and continued in Petersburg a decade later are shelved for most of Silver Dove’s length. And yet the novel is still fundamentally Symbolist in Bely's intention and manifestation. Despite their warts-and-all realism (which borders on Gogolian comedy), many of the characters in the story are archetypes (perhaps in a similar way they are in Dostoyevsky, particularly in The Brothers Karamazov) meant to illustrate a deep study of Russian identity/spirit. 

If the purpose of Silver Dove was, indeed, to express certain unique aspects of rural Russian existence through the magical kaleidoscope looking glass of Symbolist prose poetics, it certainly succeeded. Nevertheless, whatever impact it’s had on world literature since its publication is overwhelmed and overshadowed by its “big brother” Petersburg, the novelistic reconstruction of that “Northern Venice”, of Russia’s “window into Europe” perched on the shores of the Bay of Finland and pierced by the calm waters of Neva which, once in the bluest of moons, break out in a mad flood like the one portrayed in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. Each of these floods is an overflow of the city’s secret aggression, of the spirit of the chaotic, the decomposing, the fermenting elements within a perfect city pre-planned by Europe’s greatest architects, but built atop putrid swamps and corpses of innumerable serfs. The frequent comparison of the novel to Ulysses is, to an extent, apt since Bely’s artistic (though not personal) attitude to the city contained in his novel is similar to Joyce’s portrayal of Dublin in Ulysses. However, what sets the books apart is that, interestingly, Petersburg is more visual and even, at points, sensual than Ulysses. It’s not nearly as allusive, as dependent on the reader’s erudition, as reliant on the locale particulars as Ulysses. Yet, Bely’s opus is much more dialogue-heavy, alive with diverse characters, and panoramas of concretely evoked scenery. Ulysses, on the other hand, seems to alternate between true stream-of-consciousness (of which there's actually very little in Petersburg) and extreme variances/experiments in form. Joyce's intention with the literary methods he pioneered was to push the extent of the incredible complexity and multi-layered-nature of the novel's narratives (at the expense of lucidity and some internal consistency) as well as to provide a deeper and more complete picture of the city of Dublin. Meanwhile, Petersburg flows more in the manner of a poem than of (proto-)meta-fiction. The chapters do not have their own idiosyncratic motifs and are organized according to thematic/formal preoccupations to a much more minute extent than Joyce’s novel. Petersburg is more consistent in its reliance on, at first sight, fairly direct, but in reality richly multi-dimensional images. In a sense Petersburg is a bit more directly representational (a comparison to visual art is very apt in relation to it), whereas Ulysses is abstract in an almost mathematical or puzzle-like sense. The artistic sensibilities at work in the two books are clearly very different. So, the comparison between the novels is indeed imperfect, but in a sense it helps to elucidates both works. It also serves as another testament for why Joyce's opus reared up a furor which continues to this day and why Nabokov considered Petersburg to be one of the greatest books of his century.

Petersburg first appeared in three issues of the Sirin magazine in 1913 and 1914, just as Russia was about to embark upon the epic misadventure of the Great War, which would directly lead it into the even more epic adventure of the Revolution. It finally appeared as a book in 1916, the same year when Bely finally returned to Russia from Europe (only to depart again a few years later). The novel’s plot takes place ten years earlier, in October of 1905 (just over a year after the events of Ulysses), during those strange days that so unnerved Bely: the days which culminated in the historic General Strike. The centerpiece of the book is a young revolutionary’s plot to assassinate his father - a senator - using a time bomb. If Ulysses was the modern(ist) Odyssey, this is a Symbolist Oedipus Rex. Nikolai, the revolutionary, is an unhappy, somewhat egotistical, incredibly intelligent young man who shares many characteristics with, say, Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment. The main difference is that his murder is committed not simply to test the universe and to proclaim a version of humanity (or egomania), but for the sake of the future, for the sake of the apocalypse, of Earth's fiery “cleansing”. This highlights the primary difference between the Russia of Dostoyevsky and the Russia of Bely. As the latter author wrote this novel the country was on the verge of the revolution which would come to define its century. He characteristically saw a mystical and an existential meaning within these events. But for the majority of the novel’s length this basic plot and its significance seem miniscule compared to the richness of the characterizations provided by the novel: of the city’s artists and bums, merchants and drunkards, the city's stores and mansions, canals and skyways. In a 2011 essay, which introduces the novel to the readers of its new translation by David McDuff, the British novelist Adam Thirwell writes, “And so the real investigation of this novel cannot be into the contours of a plot. The plot recedes in the infinity of the city. The real plot is the movement of Bely’s sentences. Or, in other words, the plot is simply a pretext for Bely to investigate how language might determine what we habitually, and mistakenly, think of as real.” The very existence of this essay by a young modern literary star and the new translation that follows it serves as a testament to Petersburg undiminished appeal, its timeless uniqueness, its consistently startling beauty. It is one of those rare books which gives us an opportunity to question and rediscover the meaning of modernity by peeling away, one after another, the layers of a modern city to get at the spirit beneath. And since almost all modern cities have more commonalities than differences, by showing us the true face of Saint Petersburg, it may help us learn to see our own cities for what they really are.

Following Petersburg’s completion Bely begins working on another novel entitled Kotik Letaev, which the author intended to be autobiographical in nature. This was supposed to be merely the first part of a lengthy epic cycle of works he wanted to call My Life. Initially, he wished to make this epic memoir the third part of the East or West cycle, but eventually Kotik Lataev took on a significance of its own. Bely's initial plan was to make it a trilogy composed of seven sections, each corresponding to a specific part of his life and focusing on a certain complex of themes associated with it. Thematically, Kotik Letaev was to be an image of childhood. The second part, Kolya Letaev, was to cover adolescence, Nikolai Letaev youth, Leonid Ledyanoi (a twist on the pseudonym “Andrey Bely”) was to be manhood, artistic maturity, and redefinition of identity. The following three books Light from the East, The Sphynx, and By the Temple’s Doorstep were to focus on, in turn, “The East”, “The West”, and “The Great War”. This complex and comprehensive plan was realized only to a small degree. The sole fully completed portion of this epic narrative was its commencement Kotik Letaev. Andrey Bely claimed to have an incredibly patterned and deep memory, recalling in great detail events which took place when he was two years old, if not younger. In writing Kotik the author finally put these impressions to use, writing a story of early self far more encompassing than Joyce’s recollections of “moo-cow” stories and schoolhouse rugby (for some reason, Joyce’s works just keep coming up as natural comparisons to Bely’s novels). The rich content of Kotik was not its only distinctive characteristic. While writing this novel Bely decided to resume his early experiments with constructing “symphonic” literary forms. In a 1918 advertisement heralding its release in the almanac The Scythians Bely called it “a symphonic novella about childhood.” The text seems somewhat fragmented like the realm mind of a child, largely separated into collections of motifs rather than a time-based narrative. Sergey Esenin, one of the greatest poets of the generation which succeeded Bely’s (and whom Bely, nevertheless, outlived) praised the novel upon its 1918 release:

“We owe very much to Andrey Bely, his amazing elongation of the word from hardness out to the universe. It’s as if he sculpts it from space itself… In Kotik Letaev, the most brilliant literary creation of our time – he has filled the word with the very thing which we contemplated only with shadows of our thoughts, in the waking day ripped out the tail from a dove he dreamt up, and clearly drew up the possibilities which were obscured from us to separate with our soul from our body, as if it was a snakeskin.”

In 1922 the novel finally came out in book form, but by that point Bely, who was, once again, residing abroad (where he was already starting to feel progressively lonelier and more disconnected from his “creative wellspring”) has already switched over to other projects. The period after the initial release of Kotik Letaev marked the return of Bely’s focus on poetry (if only in part). In 1916 and 1917 he began wrote dozens of shorter poem which symbolically digested many wartime and revolutionary themes. Many of them were gathered in a collection titled Zvezda (“Star”). In this thematic turn he matched other Symbolists such as another master of Bely's generation Maximillian Voloshin (though Voloshin’s imagery was usually more direct, with visions of fiery zeppelins and other such monstrosities of the era). This is something that Blok, more or less, avoided getting into until he simply couldn’t anymore and the revolutionary spirit intuitively exploded out of him at the end of the decade with The Twelve and a few shorter poems (after which he stopped versifying for good). Meanwhile, Bely decided to try out a longer/epic poetic form for the first time. These were no longer musical in the same way as his “symphonies” but were much more singular in their internal progressions, though they also seemed to almost tango with their complex unusual rhythms. Indeed, instead of stanzas they appear to be arranged into enthusiastic dance steps. They rhyme wherever rhyme is necessary, or crackle out blank verse lines like a machine gun, at times sounding conversational and urbane, but suddenly turning as sublime as earthen stars. Two of Bely’s most famous longer poems from that period are Christ is Risen (1918) and The First Date (1921). The First Date, being grounded in the poet’s recollections, somewhat recalls Blok’s unfinished epic poem Vengeance.

In the pages of 1922’s Notes of a Weirdo Bely brings back “Leonid Ledanoy”, the pen named of Nikolai Letaev, the planned protagonist of My Life, as his own literary alter ego. Notes of a Weirdo was another biographical novella (and a semi-fictionalized addition to a series of actual memoires which Bely would begin writing soon thereafter) mainly concerned with the author’s days in Europe (Switzerland, France…). While reading this work, like many of Bely’s creations, it’s easy to focus in on the chaos, to assume that the author is merely jumping around his mental impressions at random. But that would be largely incorrect. A detailed study of any of Bely’s works almost inevitably reveals the presence of a method to this madness. All throughout his writerly odyssey Bely maintains a propensity for Kantian logos, for a polemical consistency which reveals itself only beneath a certain kind of light and through a certain lens. One of Bely’s long-term goals, both with his poetry and ”self-explorational” prose, was to create a “panorama of consciousness”. He describes it as such in the first chapter of his “diary” published in 1919: “Article, theme, plot – an aberration; there is only one theme – to describe the panoramas of consciousness, the sole goal – to focus on “the I”, assigned to me by the mathematical center point.” However, these “panoramas” do not necessarily refer to the same mode of literary revelation (or self-elation) as the now very well-known “stream of consciousness”, which Bely does explore but very occasionally, and which is usually limited to thought/impression progression within a very select mind: almost like a printout of an objectivized thought-track. On the other hand, Bely’s technique was open towards a menageresqie collection of impressions, of individualized metamorphoses of reality channeled through the mind’s eye. The effect is often disorienting and appears to mystify just what the objective features of these stimuli actually are... if such a thing as objectivity exists at all (Do ask a schizophrenic...) And does it? Some of Bely’s work sure does make one wonder about solipsism and whatnot by highlighting the mind’s power to dictate the nature of reality. Ultimately, one comes up against the wall of the unanswerable: the great void of incurable ignorance gaping even in the face of all our science and logic which Bely managed to so thoroughly master and which, for him, had a direct association with his father the mathematician. Could the figure of “the father” in Petersburg be the archetype of a controlling/reasonable “Europenizing” influence both in Russia and within the panoramas of Bely’s personal consciousness? After all, his name in the novel is “Apollon Apollonovich”: a dual reference to Apollo who for Nietzsche symbolized the elucidating/organizing element of the Western scientific/philosophic mind. Ultimately, the son (Bely) wishes to rebel against this element by involving himself in the intuitive/the gnostic/the transcending. This opposing energy in Bely’s mind could be a version of “mystical anarchism”, an attitude in the fin de siècle Russian intellectual/artistic world which overtook many of Bely’s fellow littérateurs. This attitude (which may or may not have been defined enough to be called “a doctrine”) was very strongly influenced by the teachings/views of Vladimir Solovyev who had such a profound effect on young Bely. It was essentially an apocalyptic vision, prophesying the country’s transmutation into a fairground of intuitive creation, into a land ruled by seers and mystics. Unlike actual anarchism, it wasn’t so much a political program consisting of criticizing, resisting, and neutralizing power centers within society. It was a much more encompassing, but less defined vision. Its great gift to humanity was supposed to be the universalization of the God-like power of creation: giving everyone the full right to be a vehicle of novelty, a vessel of illumination, and a spider spinning out their webs of truth, their lattices of interpreted – and, thus, existent – reality. If Bely ever had a true social agenda, it would have had to be this epic. And the promise of fulfilling at least a portion of this vision is the reason for Bely’s enthusiastic support of the revolution. He saw in it a mystical purpose, or at least the seed of one. The fact that his hopes for the revolution were, in some sense, so otherworldly may have, ironically, meant that he could not be fully disappointed in its reality since he was disappointed in it, at least to some extent, since the very beginning. And if he was disappointed, it certainly wasn’t to the same extent than Blok or, say, Mayakovsky of whom the latter viewed the world in a predominantly materialistic way.

And perhaps, above all, it was Bely’s uncompromising and idiosyncratic spirituality which saved him both from himself and the Soviet authorities during the early purges. He always seemed too aloof and disconnected from conventional politics and philosophies, always picking a path of his own or combining elements of seemingly disparate disciplines and symbol-systems and then making them into something which could only have come from his personal poetic adventureland. Fortunately for him, it’s doubtful that the authorities could conceive him of riling anyone up in a political sense beyond inspiring prospective dreamers to earnestly involve themselves in spiritualities and cultural strains obviously “alien” to the monolithic Soviet culture. But simple eccentricity was usually tolerated in the USSR, though not always its artistic expressions. Recall the example of Daniil Kharms who for many years walked around in a Victorian gentleman's (or maybe Sherlock Holmes's?) getup and with a pipe in his hand. It was only when he began founding and, even worse, titling artistic movements which purportedly rejected the status quo of Soviet letters (and “official” culture), only when he started typing up and spreading manifestos: it was only then that he got himself arrested. And then there were satires: a deathly sin against the crisscrossed hammer and sickle. But Bely was an entirely different case. Besides the fact that he was much more famous than Kharms and his ilk (and you don't just “disappear” someone that famous), by the time he finally returned to the USSR for good in the mid-twenties he was long-past the days in his life when he was capable of any direct involvement in worldly affairs that could possibly get construed as genuinely subversive. Some of his recent writing, such as his memoirs, may have been, at times. But the cryptic nature of Bely's preoccupations may have, for once, done him a favor. No, he never became a revolutionary, but he also believed in the power of truth, in the necessity of novelty too much to ever turn into a reactionary. More than anything he resembled Prince Myshkin out of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot: a man misplaced in time, still believing that it is only “beauty” which can and will “save the world”. And so, instead of becoming politicized like many of his fellow poets, Bely became increasingly more involved in his personal cosmology and the exploration of his journey’s spiritual and creative significance. By focusing more and more exclusively on these preoccupations he may have actually evolved in a similar manner to a number of surviving futurists (for instance, Kamensky). Among other creations this late-period self-mythologizing impulse became responsible for his detailed, creative memoirs as well as for further epic poems on the subject of... who else but himself: of himself surrounded by a magical vortex of existence, dancing around him like a wild galaxy. Politics remained elsewhere. Somewhere far, it seemed, in an entirely different dimension. So did religion, for that matter.

Though, subjectively-speaking, the poet continued living in “Bely-land”, he also did physically return to his homeland to meet his life's final stage. Bely’s return to the USSR was precipitated by his final girlfriend and eventually his wife Klavdia (Claudia) Vasilyeva. She was contacted by certain Soviet authorities and told to promise the middle-aged scribe that the Soviet reading public is, at last, ready for him. Bely was informed, to his surprise, that the country’s bureaucratic literary dons view his work with utmost reverence and that it has consistently been in print during the years he spent abroad. If he returned home, he would be treated by the appreciative Russians like “a new Pushkin”. Being aware of just how challenging his work may be for the regular reading masses, Bely was understandably skeptical of this exuberant invitation, but his intense homesickness overshadowed these doubts and, soon thereafter, Bely was on a fast-moving train. He was going home.

But when he got there, he did not find a country which he was promised. Nor was it the country he recalled. The Soviet enculturation of its masses into the new pseudo-communist values necessary for the functioning of a state-capitalist economy fostered a new kind of conformity. Perhaps, if it had provided a revolutionary payoff it could have seemed somewhat justified even to a person like Bely. But the ever-expanding bureaucratization which followed in the wake of the New Economic Policy fostered just as much inequality and elitism as the somewhat decentralized primitive capitalism of the Russian Empire. Meanwhile, the country’s genuine revolutionary values were jettisoned in favor of demagoguery and simplistic five and ten-year plans when members of Bolshevik Party’s far-left wing who were led by Trotsky became outmaneuvered, then discredited, exiled, or executed by Stalin and his faction. Trotsky didn’t like Bely’s work, but was famously in favor of allowing artists complete freedom and even support as long as they didn’t overtly oppose the revolution and Bely was, in his own way, one of its biggest supporters. The tragic example of Blok’s preventable death taught the party that their ought to treat their geniuses better and for a few years throughout their twenties, numerous Soviet creative probably had it quite a bit better than their counterparts in the West. All they had to do in return for nice rent-less apartments, summer homes, news cars, and frequent new editions and show their loyalty once in a while by accepting party errands. But the minute Sergey Esenin, one of the country’s most famous poetic sons, refused Trotsky when the revolutionary asked him to serve as an editor for a literary journal, Esenin lost most of his privileges and “protections” overnight. So, a writer had to always tread carefully even during the “better days”. By the time of Bely’s arrival back in the country Lenin was dead, Stalin was already on his rise, and the “better days” for artists were about to end. Unsuspecting of the oppression which they were about to face, the majority remained outspoken (as all revolutionary artists should be), even when the subjects of the artistic conversations veered in the direction of USSR’s continuing social problems and the government’s growing totalitarian tendencies. For that some of the country’s brightest talents were accused of participating in counter-revolutionary plots throughout the 1930’s and executed or put into Gulags. The country’s creative population was certainly one of the most suffering social strata during the decade’s purges.

However, for reasons already mentioned, particularly Bely’s essential aloofness from worldly pursuits be they actively revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, he remained pretty much untouched. After all, to accuse him of participating in a secret plot may have seemed absurd to anyone who’s known him and he has known some important people in his day, some of whom remained influential even in Stalin’s USSR. One of them was Maxim Gorky, a literary genius whose style was geometrically opposed to Bely’s. In a 1922 letter Gorky effectively summed up the basic attitude of the Soviet literary mainstream to Bely: “One mustn’t fail to take Bely as a whole, with all of his attributes, like a certain idiosyncratic world, – as a planet on which exists its own – unique – vegetative, animal, spiritual set of worlds.” This statement expresses both the skepticism felt by the “Soviet realists” towards Bely’s values and topics as well as their deep respect of him, his originality, and his genius. No, he was too unique, too incomprehensible to the regular proletarian or even middle-class person to ever be viewed as a “new Pushkin” and yet he was irreplaceable in his uniqueness. Besides, such different and essentially Russian/Soviet authors as Mayakovsky and Esenin expressed a deep gratitude to Bely and his courageous spirit of literary innovation.

Like almost all writers who didn’t exactly “fit the mold” Bely did experience some hardships in the late twenties and early thirties. Nevertheless, compared to the majority he was quite lucky. He continued to get published (albeit less frequently than in the past), occasionally invited to speak, and was generally treated like a curious art-museum piece. But for someone who may have actually preferred to be left alone to follow his personal muse this might have not been such a tragic existence (in contrast to, say, Mayakosvky who killed himself as soon as his star began fading). Throughout these years he was accompanied by his loyal new wife who was quiet, caring, intelligent, fairly attractive, and six years younger than Bely. Since his return to Russia the author’s creative energies were occupied by a series of novels which he intended to be his true magnum opus. This new cycle was entitled Moscow and was supposed to contain four full-length novels. Unfortunately, Bely, among his other achievements, was also a master of unfinished epic cycles and Moscow too remained unfinished. Perhaps due to its uncompleted nature the novel has never achieved the same level of critical recognition and appreciation as its older cousin Petersburg. Nonetheless, Moscow is a revelation in many ways, being a manifestation of Bely’s fully evolved mature prose style. Curiously, in this final great work of fiction Bely, who was always known for his over-complexity, frames many descriptions and especially dialogues in an unusually spare way. The novels are almost entirely composed of descriptions and rarely delve into the characters’ heads. In that sense, they resemble a massive and insanely detailed landscape painting of Moscow, a moveable painting which changes as it's chucked down the rushing river of early 20th century Russian history. During the years Bely was working on Moscow he picked up on the changing currents of world power. Petersburg contained themes of an Eastern, anti-individualistic threat to Russia. By the time of Moscow was picking up on the tidings of spreading fascism. He now re-evaluated the source of the potential threat. This was far from the only example of Bely’s prophetic prowess. In 1907, when still a very young man, the poet wrote these lines during one of his stays in Paris:

Believed in the golden shimmer,
But perished from sun-woven arrows,
With his thought did he centuries measure,
But failed just to live out his life.
 
Don’t laugh at the perished poet:
Bring him a little flower.
My porcelain wreath is beating
On a cross through both winter and summer…

In this manner the poet may have predicted the circumstances of his own death which claimed him in 1934. It came courtesy of a sunstroke, a strange and unusual factor: a writer, a vehicle of Apollo, being pierced by sun-woven arrows, being claimed by the sun… and rising into the light, away from the grime and the suffering of a confused country recklessly treading through a confused century. Andrey Bely/Boris Bugayev – the poet, the spiritualist, the seer, the “Silver Age” romantic hero died in the arms of his wife. Slowly, his bright blue eyes dimmed, their color becoming one with a cloudless January sky. One likes to imagine him smiling in those final moments. At that time he was staying in Koktebel, a resort town in South-Eastern Crimea. Many Russian artists and especially poets viewed Koktebel as a vision of an Earthly paradise. It was popular with them in the same way as California’s Big Sur is with American writers and painters. Maximilian Voloshin used to have a house there which he opened as a sanctuary to the wandering geniuses of this world, but he too was dead by the time Bely arrived there in the winter of 1933-‘34. It’s easy to imagine what he sought there: it was something long-deserved. Koktebel was a floral Eden as far from the mystic fogs and the gallant, mean, ghosts of Petersburg as from the tall cathedrals and cold prison walls of Moscow, the two places which Bely helped forever preserve in the literary memory, instilled as they were in Bely’s day: full of unprecedented anxieties and undreamt of tragedies. So, perhaps it is somewhat fitting that the bard and the chronicler of Russia’s two capitals, a poet, in a sense, charged with the big cities' souls, had to leave them behind before finding his own eternal peace, his pathway to heaven, to a purity and a perfection he tried worked so tirelessly to access throughout his life. In some sense, he may have finally found it in an unspoiled place filled with Mediterranean-climed splendor: a place which was already at peace, already an earthen heaven. Thus, it may be appropriate that this was also the place where he ended up being “taken” from us. In another sense it may be true that Andrey Bely indeed “failed” to live out his life. Certainly, he never grew old, dying at what may have been the peak of his creative powers. Nonetheless, the life he did lived, as they say, “contained multitudes”. And since he’d been gone for every person he helped illuminate during his lifetime he has inspired a hundred more. Though after his death his work became for a long time unfashionable in the Soviet Union, having been labeled as “decadent” and “bourgeoisie” by cold and corrupt Party functionaries, it gradually made a resurgence and even in the 1960’s was a not-very-well-kept secret amongst Russia’s new liberals and poets during the country’s Thaw-precipitated artistic renaissance. And, the spirit of his timeless art undiminished by time, Bely continues to inspire countless new readers today, bringing echoes of the realm he discovered to a world which once again appears to be on the precipice of great novelties. May they not be corrupted and bloodied. May we all share in the vision, in the poetry of spirit. And let us remember Andrey Bely, a humble benevolent deity smiling a mystic smile from up in the beaming heavens.