SOURCE: "Symphonic Structure in Andrej Belyj's Pervoe Svidanie," California Slavic Studies, Vol. VI, 1971, pp. 61-70.

[In the following essay, Karlinsky praises Bely's use of musical imagery, forms, and language in his book-length narrative poem The First Encounter.]

A student of Russian poetry would have to go back to Lomonosov to find another Russian poet whose poetry is comparable to Andrej Belyj's in its scope and variety of erudition, spanning the most diverse fields. Certainly, no other twentieth-century poet has Belyj's grasp of physical and mathematical sciences, of speculative philosophy, of aesthetics, of linguistics, and of musical theory and practice….

Andrej Belyj … could write of musical theory and practice both in his prose (descriptions of concerts, recitals, and private musical performances in his Second Symphony, the chapter on Émilij Metner in Načalo veka, and the numerous passages on music in the rest of the autobiographical trilogy) and in verse (especially in the poèma Pervoe svidanie) with a consummate understanding of the subject and with fluent use of technical vocabulary. Deržavin and Annenskij have written impressively of individual musical instruments, but Belyj is unique in Russian poetry in his detailed and knowledgeable evocations of individual orchestral timbres in Pervoe svidanie. For all the mystical and symbolic overtones of the scene at the concert, Belyj finds remarkably apt and precise verbal means to convey the tone coloring of a quartet of horns set off antiphonally by bassoons:

И в строгий разговор валторн
Фаготы прорицают хором

or the effect of a trombone crescendo on a single note:

И стаю звуков гонит он,
Как зайца гончая собока
На возникающий тромбон

Only a person totally at home with various orchestral timbres could have imagined the nightmarish metaphors and the alliterative howl of u's Belyj uses to convey the auditory chaos of an orchestra tuning up before a performance:

Возня, переговоры … Скрежет:
И трудный гуд, и нудный зуд—
Так ноет зуб, так нудит блуд …
Кто зто там пилит и режет?

Which is immediately followed by an equally onomatopoetic depiction of a set of kettledrums being tuned up:

Натянуто пустое дно,—
Долдонит бебень барабана,
Как пузо выпуклого жбана:
И тупо, тупо бьет оно …

Equally apt are Belyj's visualization of an orchestra conductor's typical gestures and his felicitous epithet for the chord of the diminished seventh which is about to be resolved: vozduxoletnyj septakkord. Belyj's paean to the versatility of the diatonic scale is remarkable for its subtle ambiguity, because the term zvukorjad (an old term for "mode") corresponds etymologically to the German Tonreihe and is used here in a context that may suggest the dodecaphonic composition systems of Schönberg and Webern, already evolving, but not yet fully stated or practiced at the time Pervoe svidanie was written (1921):

Интерферируя наш взгляд
И озонируя дыханье,
Мне музыкальный звукоряд
Отображает мирозданье—
От безобр зий городских
До тайн без бразий Эреба
До света образов людских
Многообразиями неба

The fivefold paronomastic and prosodic permutation of the stem obraz in the above passage suggests a typical procedure of serial musical composition, and is in its way as disconcertingly and inexplicably prophetic as Belyj's famous mention of the atomic bomb in the same poèma.

Although familiar with music since infancy, Belyj probably acquired his thorough knowledge of the symphonic form through Émilij Metner's detailed commentary on Schubert's C-major Symphony during their joint visits to Arthur Nikisch's orchestral rehearsals in 1901.

Four of Belyj's early prose works bear the title "Symphony." The use of the term was not figurative or metaphorical: it was Belyj's intention to apply the principles of musical form to literary, verbal structures. Therefore, while these works can and have been studied by literary scholars, they are unique in world literature in that methods of musical scholarship and analysis are equally applicable to them. For example, the Second Symphony (The Dramatic) has its themes arranged in the discernible structure of a four-movement classical symphonic cycle, as practiced by Haydn or Beethoven: the first part is a traditional sonata-allegro, the second part a dreamy adagio with religious themes, and also with sonata features. The third and fourth parts can be seen as the scherzo and the traditional rondo-finale. The Third Symphony (The Return), although divided into three parts, is in terms of its musical structure not a symphonic cycle but a vast one-movement sonata-allegro, with the exposition of the themes in the first part, their restatement and development in another tonality (in another universe, in this case) in the second part, and their recapitulation and synthesis in the original key in the last part. These are only brief indications of the kind of musicological analysis that could and should be profitably applied to Belyj's four symphonies in prose.

However, his most thorough and systematic application of the classical symphonic structure was made in a work written in verse and not containing the word "symphony" anywhere in its title. The autobiographical narrative poem Pervoe svidanie written in 1921, at the time Belyj was expecting to leave Soviet Russia to join his anthroposophic mentor Rudolf Steiner and the woman he loved (Anna Turgeneva) in Switzerland, is a work permeated with the poet's lyrical joy. The narrative covers the period described by Belyj later in his prose memoir Na alo veka: his student days and his realization in May of 1900 that he would become a professional writer. Autobiographical elements that we know from the memoir (Belyj's friendship with the family of Mixail Solov'ev, his infatuation with the wealthy merchant's wife Margarita Morozova, his pilgrimage to the tomb of Vladimir Solov'ev) are interwoven in the poem with themes treated in Belyj's Second Symphony (The Dramatic)—a mystical encoun ter at the symphony concert, the ghost of Vladimir Solov'ev hovering over the city of Moscow, the satirical glimpses of Moscow's academic intelligentsia.

Another work of Belyj's connected to Pervoe svidanie is his most baffling piece of writing, the long prose poem on language, Glossolalia. Poèma o zvuke, written at the time of the October Revolution. Ostensibly a linguistic treatise, the work is in fact a set of inchoate, instinctive, illogical meditations on language, to which, as Belyj himself was the first to admit, scholarly linguistic criticism would not be applicable. The Belyj who wrote Pervoe svidanie, even more than the author of Glossolalia, is no longer the typically Symbolist poet he was when he wrote the Symphonies and his first collection of verse. By 1921 Belyj had read Xlebnikov (including his inchoate, instinctive theories of language), Majakovskij, possibly even Boris Pasternak. He was assuredly familiar with the writings of Viktor Šklovskij, Roman Jakobson, and other Russian Formalists. The stylistic and lexical texture of Pervoe svidanie shows the unmistakable impact of Russian Futurism and Formalism. Combined with this impact is some seepage from Glossolalia, which leaves its precipitate in the form of certain verbal devices and of the mystical idea of salvation through language and linguistics, expressed in the Introduction to the poem.

Classical Russian literature provides two additional ingredients: deliberate stylistic reminiscences from Puškin's Eugene Onegin in the passages on the Solov'ev family and the Gogolian demon of trivia (bes pošlosti) who appears prominently in chapters 3 and 4. All these heterogeneous themes and elements are brilliantly fused by Belyj into a verse texture almost without equal in Russian poetry for its sustained inventiveness and carefully organized into a strict and regular four-movement symphonic cycle consisting of a sonata-allegro (with a separate introduction), an adagio in the form of a three-part Lied, a scherzo with a trio (in which a reprise of the end of the first movement serves as an introduction) and a rondo-finale with a coda.

The brief 32-line Introduction is absolutely astounding in its concentration of numerous levels of meaning. The initial image of the miner-gnome who crushes crunching consonants to form tomes is a clever personification of the mechanical aspects of human language, dead sounds not yet brought to life by spirit and meaning. The gnome is metamorphosed into the "I" of the poem: at first a personified stylistic device then a tired, aging poet, likened to a broken object and to an extinguished bakery oven, baking indifferent verse to order. The tired, extinguished poet starts to pray to God and the poet-oven immediately catches fire. The prayer to God becomes an invocation to language. Images of nature transcending its limitations (an inflated leaf on a dead stick, an ermine in the sky) powerfully convey the idea of spiritual resurrection, central to the entire Introduction. Animals symbolic of the Evangelists—the lion, the ox, and the eagle—which also figure in the Apocalypse, are evoked and the spiritual qualities assigned to them in Christian theology are compared to various capabilities of human language. This theological digression culminates in a complex explanation of the Christogram which combines the initial letters of "Jesus Christ" to form the symbol for Life:

«Ха» с «І» в «Же»—«Жизнь»: Христос Иисус—
Знак начертательного смысла

followed by a paraphrased quotation of an appropriate verse from the Gospel According to St. John and the direct mention of the Evangelists, represented until now by their symbolic animals. In the last four lines of the Introduction, the pedantic gnomes of the inert language matter are left behind, the crunching (xrust) of consonants and of dying flames is replaced by crackling sounds of finely-honed sound instrumentation (instrumentacij grannyj tresk), and the extinguished oven and the worn-out poet of the beginning are both ablaze with sacred fire. Language is the agent that accomplishes the progression from mineral to fire, from inert matter to vibrant life and is thus assigned divine powers. As in Glossolalia, but in a more convincing and successful manner, the Introduction fuses theology and linguistics. Belyj's concentrated poetic art manages to combine into a harmonious whole such seemingly heterogeneous elements as paraphrases from the New Testament and literary terminology of Russian Formalists: stilističeskij priem (stylistic device), jazykovye idiomy (idioms of language) and instrumentacija (sound instrumentation); the latter may refer not only to language phenomena treated in the Introduction but also to the orchestral instrumentation described at length in chapter 3 of the poem.

In Belyj's prose Symphonies distinctive verbal structures were used as equivalents of musical themes (this applies less to his Third Symphony, where thematic functions are more likely to be taken by characters or situations). In the sonata-allegro of the first chapter of Pervoe svidanie, the symphonic structure utilizes complexes of ideas as its basic structural element. The principal theme of this first movement (and in a way, of the entire poem) is the theme of reminiscences of Belyj's experiences in 1900; subsumed within this theme are the ideas of creative imagination and of poetry. The principal theme is stated in the first 22 lines of chapter 1 and is then followed by three related subordinate themes that in turn take up Belyj's activities and interests at that juncture of his life.

Subordinate theme I is his daily and social life as a student at Moscow University. It begins with the lines:

Меня пленяет Гольбер Гент …
И я—не гимназист: студент.

Subordinate theme II has to do with young Belyj's interest in mythology, mysticism, and the history of religions, an interest considered inappropriate and even shocking by his mathematician-father. This theme is brought in with the ironic discussion of Hindu mystics and sacred texts and is soon contrasted with subordinate theme III: the physical sciences that Belyj was then studying:

Мне Мениелеев говорит
Πериодичесой системой

The exposition of themes is completed by two humorous restatements of subordinate theme II, which contrast the role of mythology in ancient times and in the modern world.

The development section, beginning with the lines:

Из зыбей зыблемой лазури,
Когда отвеяна лазурь,

combines and varies the principal and the three subordinate themes in various combinations. This section is particularly notable for its inventive use of Xlebnikov-like neologisms:

Туда серебряные роги,
Туда, о месяц, протопырь!
Взирай оттуда, мертвый взорич,
Взирай, повешенный, и стынь—
О, злая, бешеная горечь,
О, оскорбленная ледынь

The recapitulation section takes up the subordinate themes II and III (in reverse order):

И строгой физикой мой ум
Переполнял: профессор Умов

(this is the section which contains the celebrated prediction of the atomic bomb), then the principal theme:

В душе, органом проиграв
Дни, как орнамент, полетели,
Взвиваясь запахами тρав,
Взвиваясь запахомм метели.

and concludes with a developed restatement of subordinate theme I, which this time incorporates some new imagery and syntactic structures that turn out to foreshadow thematic and structural elements of chapter 3 of the poem. The interrupted evocation of the concert hall and of Beethoven at the end of chapter 1 is analogous to the musical effect of an interrupted cadence, the resolution of which has been postponed until chapter 3, where this theme is fully stated and developed. The reversal of thematic sequence in the recapitulation, although not usual in musical practice, is not unprecedented. [In Muzykal'naja forma, 1947] I. V. Sposobin calls this type of recapitulation zerkal'naja repriza ("mirror recapitulation") and cites instances of it in Wagner's overture to "Tannhäuser," Liszt's "Les Préludes," and the first movement of Raxmaninov's Fourth Piano Concerto.

Chapter 2 of Pervoe svidanie is, as previously stated, a simple three part Lied in form. The apartment where Mixail Solov'ev, his wife and their son Sergej opened the new world of poetry and imagination to the young Borja Bugaev, the future Andrej Belyj, is described with wit, humor, and enormous affection. Mixail Solov'ev is assigned as constant background several objects (his "bistre"-colored armchair, his glittering pince-nez, his cigarette) which accompany every mention of his name like refrains. Two principal characters of the poem, Vladimir Solov'ev and Nadežda Zarina (fictitious poetic name for Margarita Morozova), who are later given prominent roles, make their first brief appearances in this first section of chapter 2. The contrasting second section of this chapter, describing Belyj's and Sergej Solov'ev's visit to Vladimir Solov'ev's grave at the cemetery of the Novodevičij Monastery (similar to the analogous episode in the Second Symphony), is set off from the rest of the poem by its versification. It is written in couplets of iambic tetrameter, using only masculine rhymes, whereas the rest of the poem freely alternates masculine and feminine rhymes. The final section of the chapter takes the reader back to the Solov'ev apartment, but this time Vladimir Solov'ev is the center of attention. The philosopher and poet, to whom Belyj owed so much of his spiritual development, is, as it were, conjured from his grave, and he appears, not as a ghost (as will be the case later on in chapter 4), but as a memory of Belyj's actual brief encounters with him in his brother's apartment. Fragments of the concert passages from chapter 3 intrude even more insistently than they did at the end of chapter 1 into the portrait of the philosopher, a portrait that is a unique mixture of grotesquerie, satire, and affection. In the last evocation of Vladimir Solov'ev in this chapter, however, grotesquerie and satire disappear for a moment and we are given a tremendously moving brief requiem:

Он—канул в Вечность: без возврата;
Прошел в восторг иездешних мест:
В монастыре, в волнах заката,—
Рукопрстертый белый крест
Стоит, как память дорогая;

which the irrepressible humorist in Belyj cannot resist from topping with a last lapse into the ridiculous a few lines later:

Так всякий: поживет, и—помер,
И принят под такой-то номер.

I have attempted to demonstrate the thoroughness and logic with which Belyj applied the procedures of musical form to the structural organization of his most important narrative poem. The scope of this [essay] does not allow for detailed examination of the scherzo form in chapter 3, the chapter that is the focal point of the poem, with its final realization of the musical themes presaged in the first two chapters, its dialectical development of the images associated with the Evangelists in the Introduction, and, most important of all, the poet's mystical encounter at the concert (the music serving as a catalyst) with Nade da Zarina, Belyj's equivalent of Vladimir Solov'ev's Sophia and Blok's Prekrasnaja Dama. The trio in the scherzo is realized not only formally, but also symbolically, in the three-fold contrast between the poet, Zarina, and the Gogolian demon of trivia brought into the concert hall by the philistine members of the Moscow society and academic world.

The recurrent rondo theme of chapter 4 is provided by the poet's wanderings through Moscow streets after the concert. Memories of other similar wanderings through snowy streets return throughout the chapter to serve as rondo refrains. The rondo episodes interspersed with these refrains form a retrospective synthesis of the thematic material of the first three chapters. The religious motifs of the Introduction and the theme of Vladimir Solov'ev from chapter 2 dominate the end of the chapter. The final appearance of Vladimir Solov'ev as an invisible ghost in a snowstorm may have been suggested to Belyj by the figure of Christ in Blok's The Twelve, but this Blokian image is ingeniously fused with the last echo of the concert hall imagery:

«Ты кто?»
—«Владимир Соловьев:
Воспоминанием и светом
Работаю на месте зтом …»

И никого: лишь бельΙӀй гейзер…
Так заливается свирель;
Так на рояли Гольденвейзер
Берет увенную трель.

The image of the Virgin in the last lines of chapter 4 and the final brief conclusion reaffirm the religious mood of the initial Introduction, not ecstatically and vibrantly as there, however, but on a note of peace and serenity.

Pervoe svidanie is an astoundingly successful piece of poetry, rewarding on many levels of perception. It is also a work that could and should be studied from the most diverse angles. Its debt to the Apocalypse and to the Gospel According to St. John; its relationship to Glossolalia, to the Second Symphony and to Belyj's autobiographical trilogy; its treatment of the person and the writings of Vladimir Solov'ev; its debt to Russian Futurists (especially Xlebnikov) and Formalists—these are some of the problems this complex poem raises. A full-length study of the musical structural devices Belyj used in this poem (which the present [essay] has only sketched out) could easily result in a book-length treatise.

Such future scholarly attention would be well deserved. Written during a decade when Russian narrative poetry scaled such astounding peaks as Majakovskij's "Pro èto" ("About This"), Marina Cvetaeva's "Krysolov" ("The Pied Piper"), Kuzmin's "Forel' razbivaet led" ("Trout Breaking Through the Ice") and Zabolockij's "Toržestvo zemledelija" ("Triumph of Agriculture"), Belyj's autobiographical verbal symphony can make a valid claim to being one of the two or three most profound, most complex and most verbally dazzling narrative poems in the entire history of the Russian poèma.