SOURCE: "Bely's Poetry and Verse Theory," in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Spiritualism, edited by John E. Malmstad, Cornell, 1987, pp. 243-84.

[In the following excerpt, Smith elucidates the factors that have inhibited critical attention to Bely's poetry, in particular the poet's extensive revision of his work.]

It is a remarkable and suggestive fact that we do not seem to possess an extended analysis, a close reading, of any single one of the 500-odd lyric poems published by Andrey Bely. One of his two longer poems, The First Encounter (Pervoe svidanie, 1921), has received more adequate critical attention; the other, Christ Is Risen (Khristos voskres, 1918), has not. Circumstances have combined to foster either partial studies with a narrow thematic focus or generalizing works that wrench small quotations out of context and make broad summary judgments. The prose works have always been studied more than the works in verse, and never in conjunction with them.

It may well be that the generalizing approach is the most appropriate and the most adequate for the study of Bely's poetry, and that close reading would not necessarily reveal features more important than the generalizations. This would assuredly be the case if we were to accept an assertion made by Gerald Janeèek in the concluding passage of one of the most incisive short treatments of Bely the poet:

The fact is that Bely was basically not a miniaturist, not comfortable in a work of small compass…. Bely's fundamental compositional process is one of repetition of words and phrases and a building of complexities by developing associations with these units as they intertwine themselves in the fabric of a text. For this process to achieve its full effectiveness and depth of significance a certain amount of space is needed, more, certainly, than the length of a page-long lyric poem…. It has been pointed out [by J. E. Malmstad] that even Bely's books of verse are not intended to be read as collections of individual self-sufficient poems, but rather as carefully structured mosaics which form a total, unified picture in which each poem has its particular place and function and is dependent on the whole for its full meaning. [Introduction to Andrey Bely: A Critical Review, 1978]

If the assertion in the last sentence of this passage is correct, then not only has Bely's poetry not been properly analyzed, but, more seriously, the proper analysis of it demands a technique that goes against the thrust of the most productive approaches of our time. It may be necessary to develop a specific analytical strategy for Bely's poetry, a strategy of macroanalysis rather than the microanalysis with which we are all familiar. How precisely we go about relating the individual lyric text to its context, even at the level of the lyric cycle, is an aspect of analysis that as far as I know has not been extensively discussed in modern poetics; the individual lyrics present enough problems to keep professional practitioners busy.

The problem of scale, though, is by no means the only one that has inhibited the discussion of Bely's poetry. Four other factors may be mentioned; they are all well known and have often been pointed out, though their ramifications have been examined but rarely. It is worth noting that in the context of the Russian critical tradition these factors are relatively benign, because they all tend to make for the intrinsic analysis of the text; that is, they tend to make for the study of the text as literature rather than any other kind of document (and this may be a reason for Bely's relative lack of impact as a poet—only rarely can he be read, for example, as a social critic). The four factors are, in descending order of nuisance value: Bely's compulsive revisions of his published texts; his activities as a theorist of verse rhythm and of rhythm as an aesthetic, philosophical, and psychological phenomenon (the three adjectives should perhaps be hyphenated); the sheer virtuosity and abundance of Bely's other writings; and, for the average reader, the forbidding obscurity of Bely's intellectual world. It hardly needs to be added that in addition to these difficulties, the manifestly idealistic, if not overtly religious, attitudes behind much of Bely's verse have discouraged serious discussion of it in the USSR.

Bely's habit of revision, much more pronounced in the verse than in the prose works, has simply made it extremely difficult to trust any of the verse texts. The frequent presence somewhere in the canon of more than one revision of a text has added an extra dimension of difficulty to any interpretation. For the critic, the effect is to reduce what one might call the specific gravity of the text by suggesting that these may not be the inevitable right words in the right order, but verbal clay that the author might cheerfully remodel whenever the whim took him. Again, for the average academic critic of lyric poetry, who counts the idea of inevitability and perhaps Yury Tynyanov's "density and unity of the verse series" (tesnota i edinstvo stikhovogo ryada) among his basic beliefs, this is an unsettling situation. This is to say nothing of the monstrous textological problem that has faced students of Bely's poetry. Until the Malmstad edition [Stikhotvoreniya, 1982-1984] came to hand (and until one has learned one's way round in it) there has been nowhere that a textual problem could be reliably addressed without tedious and annoying spadework. It remains to be seen now whether or not the Malmstad edition will provide that firm textological basis for studies of Bely's poetry that has been lacking so far. It should now be possible, for example, to investigate the contradiction that exists between the habit of revision and the "seamless garment" image of Bely's collections implied in Janeèek's statement that was cited earlier: if each collection is indeed an artistic whole greater than the sum of its parts, how then can the author remove some of these parts and revise them, apparently without any notion of definitiveness?

The second large problem that affects studies of Bely as a poet derives from his activities as a theorist. At this point it is important to say that Bely's contribution, while of immense significance as a catalyst, does not offer a basis on which to approach systematically either the work of other Russian poets or the work of Bely himself. For example, Bely's iambic tetrameter was studied in the light of the poet's theories by Kirill Taranovsky in one of the most valuable small-scale works we have on Bely's poetry [K. F. Taranovsky, International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, 1966]. But the fact is that iambic tetrameter is only one of the metrical resources that Bely employed, and his essays in rhythmical analysis have distorted its importance in his work in the minds of critics. In general, what Bely did not analyze is more important to an objective understanding of his poetic technique than what he did write about. But the aspects that Bely did not cover have hardly ever been discussed; the only real exception to this statement is an article by Ian K. Lilly [in Slavonic and East-European Review 60, 1982] which shows that the rhyme technique used in Bely's first three books of verse, something the poet never touched on in his theoretical writings, is just as distinctive and innovatory as his "theoretically based" iambic tetrameter. As John Elsworth has pointed out [in Andrey Bely: Centenary Papers, edited by Boris Christa, 1980] "there is an immense gap to be filled between [Bely's] macrocosmic statements about the nature of rhythm, and the analytical description of the individual poem." Indeed there is such a gap. The intervening levels of description, and some of the many aspects of verse structure that Bely did not theorize about, will form one of the main emphases of the present study.

The effect of Bely's other writings on the study of his poetry is a difficult thing to describe. Doubtless the main effect—though, of course, this assertion cannot be verified—has been to cause the poetry to be ignored, or at least relegated to a bad second place after the novels in critics' estimation. Perhaps the most intriguing formulation of the relative standing of Bely the poet and Bely the prose writer is that of D. S. Mirsky [in A History of Russian Literature, 1949]: "One usually thinks of Andrey Bely as primarily a poet, and this is, on the whole, true; but his writings in verse are less in volume and significance than his prose." The opening phrase of this judgment suggests that Mirsky considers Bely to be in some sense a poet on a level that outranks genre, that is, whether Bely is writing something that is formally either verse or prose. This notion, we may note, has considerable implications with respect to the idea expressed by Janecek: artistic thinking on a large scale we would take to be one of the primary characteristics of the prose writer rather than the poet, and if we accept Janecek's assertion, we would be well advised to turn Mirsky's idea on its head and say that Bely is primarily a prose writer even when he is formally writing verse. The attitude toward revision would be more normal in a prose writer as well. Bely himself was once categorical: "Everything that I have written is a novel in verse: the content of this novel is my search for truth, in its achievements and shortcomings."

We now understand something about the relationship between texts that are formally verse and those in which Bely writes metrical prose, although this question has by no means been exhausted. But this is a relatively superficial aspect of a problem that goes near to the heart of understanding Bely as a writer. There is no possibility of saying with confidence that the superiority of Bely's best novels (Petersburg, The Silver Dove, Kotik Letaev) over all his poetry (except The First Encounter) is more than a temporary critical consensus. There is such a consensus, however, and the present essay will not attempt to argue otherwise. But it will leave aside, necessarily, discussion of the relationships—both formal and thematic—between Bely's prose and his poetry, after having noted the inhibiting effect that the weight of the novels seems to have had on serious consideration of the poetry.

The fourth factor that was alleged earlier to have held back the study of Bely's poetry is the obscurity of his intellectual world. This term should be qualified immediately. It would be absurd to claim that Bely's poetic world is inaccessible. Bely frequently advertised his intellectual connections. A complete description of his poetic style would have to take account of a very large number and range of influences. This is an aspect of Bely scholarship that has hardly begun; for example, we do not have adequate studies of things as salient in Bely's poetry as his use of the Bible, or the influence of any single one of the numerous pictorial artists who have been thought to affect his perception. But one's feeling is that these stimuli have been processed by a mind more complex than is usually found in a poet, especially a Russian poet. Some of Bely's poems, the Star (Zvezda) collection being the most obvious example, cannot be comprehended without the aid of interpretive tools derived from specialized sources, in this particular case from anthroposophy. But what I mean by "obscurity" is the feeling that Bely's poetry almost always requires such a key, much more than is the case with his contemporaries among Russian poets—Aleksandr Blok, Vladislav Khodasevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky, even Valery Bryusov and Velimir Khlebnikov, despite the fact that the latter two poets drew upon aspects of intellectual and physical experience quite as remote as Bely's. It may be, to phrase this problem in the simplest way, that the ratio of intellect to emotion in Bely's poetry is generally too high, the mind hermeticizing experience and removing it from the communality of the emotions. (But on some occasions the emotions paralyze the intellect.) It is undoubtedly this abstruseness that has led to some of the more damning judgments on Bely as a poet, such as Vladimir Markov's [in the preface to Modern Russian Poetry, edited by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks, 1966]: "the fantastic visions of his early verse do not carry one away anymore, his bewailing of Russia in Ashes does not stun, and his later anthroposophic verse leaves one cold." Even more crushing is an opinion passed in 1922 by Mirsky in an article that (like Bely's Petersburg) was rejected by P. B. Struve: "Read ing Bely, you don't say 'There a man burned up.' Bely burns without burning up, like a diamond sparkling in the sun. Therefore his cosmic flights take on the indecent appearance of buffoonery and acrobatic tricks." "Burning without burning up" is perhaps the most devastating metaphor that has been applied to Bely's poetry and its effect on the modern reader; to define the causes of this effect is the most difficult challenge facing his critics.

Four major factors, then, have inhibited work on Bely's poetry. An enormous amount of basic work needs to be done before a really informed general study can be written. Only part of this groundwork will be supplied here. The main foundation on which the present essay will be based derives from the formal properties of Bely's lyric verse: an attempt will be made to describe these properties in their historical evolution. This study will incorporate the quantitative principle that Bely was the first to apply on a large scale to the study of Russian poetry, but will use it to describe structural features that Bely did not discuss. And, traducing the standpoint of its subject, this essay will use the quantitative principle without the philosophical superstructure it possesses in Bely's own theoretical work. For, in John Elsworth's words, "it is a premise that cannot well be verified outside the realm of occult meditation, and the assertions it leads to about the meaning of the poem are perhaps more striking than convincing. It only makes full sense in the context of Bely's anthroposophical Weltanschauung." I would be inclined to omit the qualifying "well" from the opening phrase.

The remarks made so far have suggested some reasons why Bely's poetry has not been studied in detail. If we go back to Janeèek's point about the essentially large-scale quality of Bely's poetry, though, we should expect that general studies rather than detailed studies will tend to be the most instructive. But the sad fact is that only two substantial general studies exist. Boris Christa's monograph [The Poetic World of Audrey Bely, 1977] on Bely's poetry, while useful as a general introduction to the more obvious problems to which the subject gives rise, is marred by several major faults. It was evidently not revised to take account of research published since its original date of writing as a thesis; besides the inadequate attention paid to the textual problem, the study suffers from a general lack of intellectual and aesthetic sensitivity. By far the best general introduction to Bely the poet is Tamara Khmel'nitskaya's essay in the 1966 Soviet edition of the poetry ["Poeziya Andreya Belogo," in Andrey Bely, Stikhotvoreniya i poemy, 1966]. This essay has been employed as the fundamental point of orientation in the present essay; detailed acknowledgment of information deriving from it will not always be made, in the interests of economy of space. The studies of Khmel'nitskaya and Christa have charted the main stages in Bely's evolution as a poet. But of all the writings on Bely's poetry, the most valuable from the point of view of interpretation remain Bely's own prefaces to and explanations of the various editions, projected and realized, of his poetry.

I mentioned earlier that Bely's habit of revision greatly complicates the study of his verse. This habit is not, of course, unique to Bely. Several other prominent Russian poets (Vasily Trediakovsky and Mikhail Lermontov among them) and many other major world poets (W. H. Auden above all in modern times) have shared this tendency. And many poets have with greater or lesser alacrity agreed to rewrite or repress their work under ideological pressure. Aside from Bely, though, probably only Auden and John Crowe Ransom have persisted with revision in the face of the cautions and condemnations of their peers. Khodasevich and Tsvetaeva were just two of many of Bely's contemporaries, poets of very different aesthetic persuasions, who warned him that his revisions diminished his work's artistic value.

Bely was not abashed by his compulsion to rewrite. And as in all matters, he rushed in with categorical justifications of the needs of the moment. He made many statements about the purposes and significance of the changes; for example, "A peculiarity of my verse is its looseness of texture [rykhlost' ]; all the things I've written in verse from the viewpoint of the years look like drafts that I published prematurely [ … ]. " As I mentioned earlier, the notion of rykhlost' is in direct contradiction to Tynyanov's concept of "the compactness and unity of the verse series." But Bely's own statements about his revisions, while naturally of considerable interest as a key to his intentions, tend to be ad hoc, partial, subjective, and unsystematic.

The first careful and objective account of Bely's revisions to be published was that of Klavdiya Nikolaevna Bugaeva and Aleksey Petrovsky [in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, nos. 27-28, 1937]. There is a concise account of them in Khmel'nitskaya's edition, and a discussion, with one telling example, in her preface. But only with the publication of the Malmstad edition, with its long preface, has it become possible to study the textual reality of the revisions. The revised texts occupy a substantial proportion of one volume of this edition (II) and the less substantial variant readings make up a major part of the commentaries on the poems, which take almost the whole of the third volume. The revisions are so extensive and complex that a thorough discussion of them here is out of the question; I will give only the briefest of surveys, concentrating on one of the major collections, Gold in Azure.

Bely was dissatisfied with his existing texts from the very start of his writing career. Of the 150 poems in Gold in Azure, 96 had previously been published in various journals and collections, and nearly all of them were revised for their appearance in Gold in Azure. The revisions, though, amount to no more than the normal, relatively minor stylistic alterations. But in the course of his life's work, Bely went back over Gold in Azure more often and more thoroughly than any other of his collections. Like Blok with his Poems about the Beautiful Lady (Stixi O prekrasnoi dame), though he repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the book, he never actually renounced it. Generally speaking, he felt its form to be inadequate to the value of its content. The content seemed to enshrine something precious from a time before his life's troubles began. Bely revised Gold in Azure to a greater or lesser extent no fewer than five times.

In 1913-14, for an edition of his verse proposed by Sirin (the publishing house of Mikhail Tereshchenko), Bely cut the number of poems in Gold in Azure by almost half and arranged them (as he did the rest of the contents of the book) in chronological order; this was the only time that he adopted this principle. He made few-radical textual revisions to the poems he chose to preserve, but the changes were substantial. The edition, though, was not published. Bely next revised Gold in Azure in 1916-17 for an edition of the poetry proposed by the publisher Pashukanis; but as with the 1914 project, the political and economic situation prevented the book's appearance. The manuscript of this revision has not survived. A further edition of the poetry was prepared for the Shipovnik house in 1918, but once again publication was aborted, and the nature of Bely's revisions is unknown.

The one-volume edition published in Berlin by Zinovy Grzhebin in 1923 takes the Sirin text as its basis, but with further extensive revision. The poems were taken back out of chronological order; the Gold in Azure section was regrouped into three large cycles; some poems that had originally appeared in Ashes were added; and some poems that had originally appeared in Gold in Azure were transferred to Ashes. However, the changes made to Gold in Azure in this instance were less radical than certain others: The First Encounter was chopped into pieces, and a substantial number of lyrics that had originally appeared as independent units were combined to form compound-structured longer poems. The Grzhebin edition represents the most extreme of Bely's attempts to mold lyric texts into an entity larger than the single lyric. But the principle, if such a single guiding element does rule the revision, has never been satisfactorily explained, either by Bely or by any of his commentators. Such a principle is clearly incompatible with the chronological principle that governed the first major revision. But the revisions for Sirin and Grzhebin both operate primarily at levels higher than the individual text: they concern the rearrangement of complete texts relative to each other in the interest of higher objectives of composition.

Bely undertook a further revision of his poetry in 1925, but only the contents list of this projected edition survives (see III). This so-called posthumous edition represents in essence an expanded version of the Grzhebin volume, with minor textual emendations and the restoration of The First Encounter as a separate entity. The list breaks off after spelling out ten additions to the Gold in Azure section, and it is impossible to make any really substantial observations about what the book might have been had it appeared.

Bely undertook the most radical revisions of the actual texts of the poetry in 1929-30, as part of his work on a projected two-volume edition of his poetry. He completed work only on the first volume, which bears the title Summonses of the Times (Zovy vremen) and survives in manuscript; yet again, the edition never appeared. The complete text was published for the first time in the Malmstad edition (II). The book returns to the compositional principles of the first three collections: it is made up of seven cycles of lyrics, and after them comes Christ Is Risen. Not only are the cycles completely new, not even reflecting the arrangement of the Grzhebin edition: Bely reworked the actual texts to such a degree that in some cases only Bugaeva's testimony can provide a clue as to the source of the revised version. Bely regarded the 1929-30 revision as his final word as a poet; its results, he hoped, would cancel out his earlier efforts. The text of Summonses is made up of 214 poems (in addition to Christ Is Risen). To relate the shorter poems to previous work is in many cases no simple matter. Besides the sheer degree of dissimilarity I have already mentioned, some texts in Summonses are revisions not of texts in an original collection but of previously published revisions, in most cases to be found in the Grzhebin edition. We also find cases where one original poem engenders more than one new one, and vice versa. These cases, however, are relatively marginal in the context of the collection as a whole.

Of the 214 texts in Summonses, as many as 48 have no known source in Bely's earlier work. It is obviously in a strict sense inappropriate to discuss these poems in the context of Bely's revisions; but the fact is that they actually represent nothing new in his work. They are all fairly uniform in manner and relate to the themes and style of Gold in Azure rather than to those of Ashes or The Urn. (The reason, as we shall see shortly, is principally that Bely had already revised the latter collections and in 1929-30 gave Gold in Azure priority.) The derivation of the identified revisions in Summonses is as follows: from Gold in Azure, 82; from Ashes, 15; from The Urn, 7; from The King's Daughter, 16; from Star, 15; and from After Parting, 31. The implications of this distribution are reasonably clear: chronology, while not completely without significance, has been a secondary factor in the shaping of the collection. The moods and themes characteristic of Gold in Azure and dominant also in The King's Daughter and After Parting— that is, the emotional, idealistic, egocentric manner—have been concentrated in this volume.

Khmel'nitskaya's illustration and discussion of a radically revised text in Summonses compares "I Know" ("Znayu"), from Gold in Azure, with its descendant of twenty years later, "The East that is now pale, the East that is now silent" ("Vostok, poblednevshii, / Vostok onemevshii"). Her conclusions are entirely justified in respect to Bely's radical revisions in general. The shaping control of stricter, more traditional verse forms is weakened; the proportion of neologisms increases markedly; only a single two-word phrase in the later poem corresponds exactly with the source; "there is inventiveness in the selection of verbal resources, but the inner meaning has been effaced." A rather more generous estimate of a radical revision was arrived at by Herbert Eagle [in Critical Review], who was interested principally in its typographical aspect. The detailed study of the 1929-30 revisions is a matter for future work; it would be possible to devote a book-length study to the evolution of the Gold in Azure texts alone.

The revisions of Ashes and The Urn follow the pattern of the Gold in Azure revisions up to the Grzhebin edition. In it they too were reshuffled from the chronological order they had been given for the Sirin edition and arranged in large groups, of which the first Ashes group is the most extreme: called "Provincial Russia" ("Glukhaya Rossiya"), it is made up of a few short lyrics and three longer poems (all actually subtitled "poema") which have been compounded from Ashes' individual lyrics; their arrangement in the three longer poems does not necessarily reflect their placement in the cycles of the original publication. The Grzhebin edition's Urn consists of four large subsections, the third and fourth of which are multipart poemy: The Tempter (Iskusitel), in twenty-six sections, and The Dead Man (Mertvets), in twelve. The Tempter actually includes some passages taken from The First Encounter. While the texts of Gold in Azure are left relatively untouched in the Grzhebin edition, except for their rearrangement, the Ashes texts bear the signs of Bely's first intensive bout of rewriting (… two rewritten poems are to be found in After Parting, dating from about the time the Grzhebin edition was being prepared).

The Grzhebin text of Ashes is actually an intermediary stage between the two published editions of the collection as a separate work. But between the 1909 Ashes and Grzhebin's and between Grzhebin's and the 1929 "second edition" lie two further reworkings of the material, neither of which was published. The earlier dates from 1921 and the later from 1925, and their arrangement reflects essentially a cutting of the overall size of the book rather than rearrangement. The 1929 edition of Ashes, the second published edition, was rearranged yet again, and a substantial number of the texts were rewritten. The revision, however, was less extensive than the emendation to which Gold in Azure was subjected for Summonses. We may speculate that for the second volume of the set of which Summonses formed the first, Bely might well have gone back to the texts of Ashes and The Urn reworked them just as radically. The only evidence we have, however, is the contents list of the projected second volume, which has the title "The Star over the Urn" ("Zvezda nad urnoi"). This list gives the titles of the poems with their sources; the Ashes material is divided into four subsections, some of whose contents differ from previous arrangements, though the earlier titles are retained. The list is prefaced by an author's note opening with the words "The second volume should be subjected to the same revision as the first" (II, 355), so it seems that Bely did have another capital revision in mind. The "Star over the Urn" list continues with material from The Urn and Starand closes with The First Encounter.

This account does no more than scratch the surface of an enormously complicated set of textual problems. The essence of Bely's revisions, however, may be sought along the following lines. The final sorting out of 1929-30 resulted in two large blocks. I have already characterized the first of them, enshrined in the "Summonses" manuscript, as emotional, idealistic, and egocentric, the style that leads from Gold in Azure through The King's Daughter to After Parting. The style of the second is the hallmark of Ashes, The Urn, and The First Encounter: disillusioned, stylistically realistic, with an abundance of historically specific places, times, and persons. In the course of his development as a poet Bely found that these two styles appeared almost simultaneously, the one undercutting the other. His compulsive shuffling of his work and his eventual rewritings may be seen as attempts to compartmentalize the two styles.

The assertion that there are two styles, perhaps rather polarities, in Bely's poetic work is a very broad generalization that fails to cover a number of contradictory impulses that persist in the work and caused Bely constant anxiety. But it may at least serve as a point of orientation in further examination of this peculiar aspect of his work; no such guiding principle has previously been advanced….

[Bely's] verse exhibits certain innovatory features, [and] these innovations were the result of the redistribution of traditional elements of nineteenth-century resources rather than a departure from them; his very restricted use of the dol'nik in particular sets him apart from the most striking innovatory currents of the versification of his time. At the level of the stanza, Bely's experimentation is limited in terms of length but highly idiosyncratic in terms of rhyme schemes. Bely does show, however, a persistent if ultimately marginal tendency toward experimentation of a more radical kind, mainly in his departure from the typographical norms of his predecessors and contemporaries. This line-breaking tendency is anticipated in Christ Is Risen and reaches its climax in After Parting. But running counter to it is a tendency toward traditional strictness of form, expressed at its fullest in the use of iambic tetrameter and quatrainal stanza forms; this tendency is anticipated most forcefully in The Urn and reaches its apotheosis in The First Encounter. Now, the ultimate theme of verses that evidence both of these formal tendencies may be essentially the same visionary experience, but the greatest achievements of Bely the poet occur when he uses the traditional forms. These conclusions, however, have been asserted on the basis of very partial evidence, mainly on the study of verse structure at the level of the line. This is the level at which Bely's own pioneering theoretical contribution was made. Subsequent theorists, while almost unanimously concurring on Bely's importance as a pioneer have departed from his methods and his conclusions.

Greatly outweighing these conclusions is the number of topics for further study that this essay has indicated. At all levels of verse structure other than the line, much more work needs to be done before any well-based conclusions can be drawn. Stanza form, rhyme, and the entire area of phonetic organization in situations other than rhyme need detailed investigation. No large-scale study has been undertaken of any single aspect of Bely's poetic style, of which neologism is possibly the aspect most in need of investigation. Apart from these problems, there remains the question of Bely's revisions and the status of the poetry he wrote after 1922. Study of this material, which has only recently become possible in a systematic way with the aid of the Malmstad edition, may force us to revise our estimate of the literary significance of the works Bely produced in the final decade of his life. It is doubtful that such a study will overturn the limiting judgments on Bely the poet by Mirsky and Markov that were cited near the beginning of this essay; but it will enable us to come nearer at least to a definition of the literary characteristics of this neglected side of Bely's creative activity.