THE SYMPHONIES

Symbolist masterpiece by the writer whose work Vladimir Nabokov ranked among Russia’s greatest literary achievements.

Boris Nikolaeyvich Bugaev (1880-1934), better known by the pen name that means “Andrew the White,” was an exponent of what translator Stone calls the “short-lived utopianism” of a movement that perhaps naïvely assumed that literature can make a difference in the world. Even so, Bely’s work is marked by a deep pessimism, and if some of it foreshadows magic realism, there is always dark sorcery at work. These four “symphonies,” a cross between prose poem and novella, manifest both idealism and doom. In “Northern Symphony,” a set of short, numbered paragraphs resembling a kind of syllogism, he writes, with foreboding. “1. Big as the mountains, the houses bristled and swaggered like overfed swine. / 2. To the timid pedestrian they winked with their countless windows, turned their blind walls to him in a sign of disdain, or mocked his secret thoughts with columns of smoke.” In the second, “Dramatic,” symphony, he concludes a series with “7. The ascetic’s glowing face smiled, even though it was cold. / 8. But clouds covered the horizon. / 9. The day was extinguished like a sad candle.” It’s an extraordinary poetry, and if the conclusions don’t always follow from the premises, the overall effect suggests the power of language as a tool of enchantment and, at times, incantation. Much of these symphonies are given over to a kind of fairy tale, although a few of them speak to Bely’s interest in politics, as when he imagines a crowd of anarchists and social democrats arguing over who is more leftist: “Over tea they threw verbal bombs,” Bely writes in a mashup of Marx and Lewis Carroll, “expropriating other people’s thoughts.” The sole shortcoming of the book are its too-scanty notes, though the ones that are there speak to telling facets of Bely’s method, such as his naming characters after birds, which would not be apparent to the reader without Russian.

Otherworldly tales of haunting beauty and a welcome addition to the canon of classic Russian literature in English.